shopt -s nocaseglob is not working on Ubuntu

Question

Case insensitive file name globbing is not working in bash on Ubuntu 11.04 64bit. The shell options specified in .bashrc are as follows:

shopt -s nocaseglob 
shopt -s nocasematch

shopt also shows that nocaseglob and nocasematch are on. But for a directory change or opening a file, it doesn't work in case insensitivity mode.

I wish to check whether any other option is needed to enable case insensitive filename globbing.

Answer 1

Are you really doing globbing, i.e. wildcard expansion? For example, suppose that you have a directory called Foobar. Then

cd foobar

doesn't do globbing, because there is no wildcard character. When you specify a file name exactly, it's up to the application to decide what to do with it, and since unix file names are case sensitive, the application will not open a file called Foobar if you tell it to open a file called foobar.

On the other hand,

cd foo*

will change to the Foobar directory (assuming there is no other match), if you've set the nocaseglob option.

You can make completion case-insensitive too. Put set completion-ignore-case on in ~/.inputrc, or

bind set completion-ignore-case on

in ~/.bashrc. Then after entering cd foo and pressing Tab, the shell will complete Foobar.