how to search case insensitively (with '*' wildcard) with 'find'?

Question

The main problem is my directory has many files with uppercase (e.g. Foobar.txt, FooBar.txt, even FOOBAR.txt). And I find it messy to find the files by exactly typing it (if I know the exact filenames, why would I use find?). So I want to type just foobar and want all three files in result

Also, I am using * both of the side of my string to match any number of characters preceding and appending in the file name.

I want an alias or function that does this.

Answer 1

The correct way then would be

find -iname \*foobar\*

Where -iname is for case insensitive search, and the \ to escape the * wildcard.

The function seems a bit unnecessary for this case, but it is easy to write

function lazyfind ()
{
    find -iname \*$1\*
}

Answer 2

Should you OS is missing GNU find -iname option, here is a portable way to achieve the same:

cifind()
{
  pattern=""
  l=${#1}
  i=1
  while [ $i -le $l ] ; do
    lc=$(echo "$1" | cut -c $i-$i | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]')
    uc=$(echo "$lc" | tr '[a-z]' '[A-Z]')
    if [ ."$lc" != ."$uc" ] ; then
      pattern="${pattern}[$lc$uc]"
    else
      pattern="${pattern}$lc"
    fi
    i=$((i + 1))
  done
  find . -name "*$pattern*"
}