Linux find ignore case

How to Search files with case-insensitive names in Linux

If you want the search for a word or phrase to be case insensitive, use the -iname option with the find command. It is the case insensitive version of the -name command. If find doesn’t locate any files matching your criteria, it produces no output.

1. How do you do a case insensitive search in Linux?
2. How do you do a case insensitive search in Unix?
3. How do I search for a file with a specific name in Linux?
4. How do I find all files containing specific text on Linux?
5. How can you perform a case insensitive search with Find and locate?
6. What is Ignorecase in Unix?
7. How does the case sensitivity affects the way you use commands?
8. Which option to the Locate command will have the command perform case insensitive searches?
9. How do you replace a word in a case insensitive in Unix?
10. How do I find a file without knowing the path in Unix?
11. How do I search for a file?
12. What is Search command in Linux?

How do you do a case insensitive search in Linux?

Case-insensitive file searching with the find command

The key to that case-insensitive search is the use of the -iname option, which is only one character different from the -name option. The -iname option is what makes the search case-insensitive.

How do you do a case insensitive search in Unix?

To ignore case when searching, invoke grep with the -i option (or —ignore-case ). Specifying “Zebra” will match “zebra”, “ZEbrA” or any other combination of upper and lower case letters for that string.

How do I search for a file with a specific name in Linux?

1. find . — name thisfile.txt. If you need to know how to find a file in Linux called thisfile. .
2. find /home -name *.jpg. Look for all . jpg files in the /home and directories below it.
3. find . — type f -empty. Look for an empty file inside the current directory.
4. find /home -user randomperson-mtime 6 -iname «.db»

How do I find all files containing specific text on Linux?

1. Open your favorite terminal app. XFCE4 terminal is my personal preference.
2. Navigate (if required) to the folder in which you are going to search files with some specific text.
3. Type the following command: grep -iRl «your-text-to-find» ./

How can you perform a case insensitive search with Find and locate?

NOTE: The find command defaults to being case sensitive. If you want the search for a word or phrase to be case insensitive, use the -iname option with the find command. It is the case insensitive version of the -name command. If find doesn’t locate any files matching your criteria, it produces no output.

What is Ignorecase in Unix?

The IGNORECASE is a built in variable which can be used in awk command to make it either case sensitive or case insensitive. If the IGNORECASE value is 0, then the awk does a case sensitive match. If the value is 1, then the awk does a case insensitive match.

How does the case sensitivity affects the way you use commands?

35) How does case sensitivity affect the way you use commands? When we talk about case sensitivity, commands are considered identical only if every character is encoded as is, including lowercase and uppercase letters. This means that CD, cd and Cd are three different commands.

Which option to the Locate command will have the command perform case insensitive searches?

By default, locate performs case-sensitive searches. The -i ( —ignore-case ) option tells locate to ignore the case and run a case-insensitive search.

How do you replace a word in a case insensitive in Unix?

GNU sed and other version does support a case-insensitive search using I flag after /regex/. Let us see how to use sed for case insensitive search and replace under Linux or Unix-like systems including macOS.

How do I find a file without knowing the path in Unix?

1. -name file-name – Search for given file-name. .
2. -iname file-name – Like -name, but the match is case insensitive. .
3. -user userName – The file’s owner is userName.

How do I search for a file?

1. Introduction.
2. 1Choose Start→Computer.
3. 2Double-click an item to open it.
4. 3If the file or folder that you want is stored within another folder, double-click the folder or a series of folders until you locate it.
5. 4When you find the file you want, double-click it.

What is Search command in Linux?

Find command is used to search and locate the list of files and directories based on conditions you specify for files that match the arguments. Find can be used in a variety of conditions like you can find files by permissions, users, groups, file type, date, size, and other possible criteria.

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Find command: how to ignore case?

I am looking for file «WSFY321.c» in a huge directory hierarchy.
Usually I would use GNU find: find . -name «WSFY321.c»
But I do not know the case, it could be uppercase, lowercase, or a mix of both. What is the easiest way to find this file?
Is there something better than find . | grep -i «WSFY321.c» ?

3 Answers 3

Recent versions of GNU find have an -iname flag, for case-insensitive name searches.

Also, since you’re specifically looking for a file you can probably shave another couple of ticks off that with the -type f flag so it won’t bother looking at the name if the inode is a directory. But that’s pedantic levels of optimization.

This pattern of adding -i before an option follows for other find options too. Ex: -name to search for a name, and -iname to make it case-insensitive. -path to search for a path, and -ipath to make it case-insensitive. I mention using -ipath in my answer here: Stack Overflow: How to exclude a directory in find . command.

With GNU find, or other versions of find that have it:

Or a compromise that’s slower but easier to type:

find . -name '. 321.c' | grep -i '/WSFY[^/]*$' 

@Gilles What is the argument to use the single quotes in the first case (exact filename) over no quotes at all?

@Peter.O No * after the / in the bash version. I meant grep -i . I use [^/]* rather than .* so as not to catch files in directories whose name begins with WSFY .

Thanks Gilles: I deleted the previous comment with incorrect syntax, and tested the ammended version, but it doesn’t work without the * (for an unexpected reason; to me at least). The case-insensitive option no longer works: shopt -s extglob nocaseglob globstar; printf ‘%s\n’ **/WSFY321.c . I suppose that’s why it is called a nocase‍​ glob: it only works in the context of a glob (or so it seems).

brew install findutils --with-default-names # restart Terminal find . -iname 'WSFY321.c' 

brew install gnu-sed --default-names # restart Terminal find -name "$(sed 's|\([[:alpha:]]\)|[\U\1\L\1]|g' <<<'WSFY321.c')" 

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How to Find Files Case-Insensitive in Linux

If you have a large bulk of files in your computer system, it is very important to keep them organized so that you can easily access the files whenever you want. If you have a busy schedule, you may simply keep dumping files onto your computer system without even knowing where a particular file is located. In this situation, it can get very difficult to work, especially when you need a specific file immediately.

The Linux operating system provides you with multiple commands that you can run in the terminal to find a specific file. Although, most of these commands are case sensitive, meaning that you need to know the exact name of your file and whether it is in lower-case or upper-case letters or a combination of both. If you do not know which letters are capitalized in the file name, then it would not be possible to locate the file that you need with these commands.

There is a method that can be used to make a file search case insensitive using certain flags in the command-line interface. This article shows you how to perform a case-insensitive file search in Linux Mint 20.

Method for Finding a File Case-Insensitive

For this method, we will use the “find” command. To find a file case-insensitive in Linux Mint 20, perform the following steps:

Click on the terminal icon in the taskbar to initiate the Linux Mint 20 terminal. This can be seen in the following image:

For the sake of demonstration of the “find” command, we will try to find the file named “Cron.sh” in our Home directory.

This file is highlighted in the following image:

The “find” command is case-sensitive by default. This means that if you have a file with a name that is in all caps, then you will need to write the file name in caps while looking for it using the “find” command. You can verify this by running the “find” command in the following manner:

Here, we have intentionally named our file “cron.sh” instead of “Cron.sh” to see whether the “find” command ignores the case and manages to search for the file with the simple “-name” flag.

You can see that the “find” command failed to look for our specified file with the simple “-name” flag, which proves that the “find” command is case-sensitive.

We can make this command case-insensitive by using the “-iname” flag with the “find” command, which ignores the case of the file name and only focuses on the initials. We can modify the “find” command to make it case-insensitive in the following manner:

After running the above command, we were easily able to find our file named “Cron.sh,” since we used this command with the “-iname” flag. You can see the output of this command in the image below. Since our file “Cron.sh” was located in our Home directory, instead of showing any path on the terminal, our system only displayed the exact name of our file in the terminal.

To make the scenario a little bit more complex and to test the effectiveness of the “find” command with the “-iname” flag, we will try to look for a file that is located within a directory inside the Home directory. The directory named Directory1 is located in our Home directory. In this directory, we have a file named “D2.txt.” This file is shown in the image below:

Now we will try to look for this file using the “find” command in the following manner:

Again, we have intentionally named our file as “d2.txt” instead of “D2.txt” to check if our “find” command works correctly or not.

From the output of this command, you can see that the command has managed to correctly find the specified file. The command has also displayed the correct file path, along with the correct name, as shown in the image below:

To complicate the scenario even more, we created the subdirectory named Directory2 inside of the directory named Directory1. We also created the file named “AbCdEf.txt” in the directory named Directory2, as highlighted in the following image:

We will now try to look for this text file. Since the name of this file includes a combination of both the upper case and lower case letters, therefore, this file name will be best for testing the effectiveness of the “find” command. We will look for this file by running the “find” command in the manner shown below:

You can see from the command shown above that we wrote the name of our file only in lower-case letters to check whether the “find” command is working correctly.

The output of this command showed the correct path of our file named “AbCdEf.txt,” along with its correct name, as shown in the following image. Hence, it has been verified that the “find” command becomes case insensitive when paired with the “–iname” flag.

Conclusion

By following the method explained in this article, you can perform a case-insensitive search for any file in your Linux Mint 20 system, regardless of where that file resides. To emphasize this point, we showed you multiple scenarios with varied locations of the files that we tried to look for using the command-line. You witnessed in all these scenarios that our method worked perfectly well. You can use this method yourself to find any file, case-insensitive, in your Linux Mint 20 system.

About the author

Aqsa Yasin

I am a self-motivated information technology professional with a passion for writing. I am a technical writer and love to write for all Linux flavors and Windows.

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