ls command: how to ignore case without globbing

Question

I use the shopt -s nocaseglob command to ignore case, but it seems like it doesn't work if I use a string without glob.

Just a question out of curiosity, is it possible to ignore case without globbing? i.e. ls a would output both a and A

Answer 1

Not with ls no. You could, however, use something like these:

$ ls [Aa]
$ find . -iname a
$ echo [aA]

The reason behind this is that the shopt command only affects how globs are expanded by the shell. So, when you run ls *a after running the shopt command, that gets expanded by your shell to

ls a A 

So, as @Kevin said, the glob is expanded before being passed to ls, therefore the nocaseglob will have no effect when you give a simple string and not a glob.

Answer 2

No. Glob expansion is handled by the shell before ls is even invoked.