So I realize this is a joke, but, and I am legit asking, isn’t there a command where you can tell Linux to treat Downloads and downloads as the same thing?
Maybe, but there is always the possibility that Downloads and downloads both exist in that path and in a case sensitive file system, those are going to be two completely different directories, so adding that obfuscation on top might wind up biting you later.
Sorta. If you put a FAT32 disk or sd card into a Linux system and mount it, it will ignore case because of the way the filenames are stored in that filesystem. However, there are a lot of important features you lose working on filesystems like that, so really it should be reserved for sneakernet with other operating systems.
I guess you could use an ntfs filesystem… Or if you just mean for autocompletion, I’ve found that if there’s no completions matching e.g. readme then zsh will autocomplete README. But I’d say case sensitivity of files is a feature not a bug. People use it to make files starting with a capital letter appear at the top of a list of files in a directory.
So I realize this is a joke, but, and I am legit asking, isn’t there a command where you can tell Linux to treat Downloads and downloads as the same thing?
ln -s Dowloads downloadsMaybe, but there is always the possibility that Downloads and downloads both exist in that path and in a case sensitive file system, those are going to be two completely different directories, so adding that obfuscation on top might wind up biting you later.
That’s where case-insensitive tab complete comes in. You can still tab through downloads and Downloads, and it doesn’t impact anything else.
Absolutely! That’s probably the best compromise to make it easier without risking something breaking or not working as expected
ln -s downloads Downloads
or
ln -s Downloads downloads
depending on your situation.
Thank you. I thought I remembered using something like this back when I ran OpenSUSE and redhat years ago.
In Bash you can use a shell option to alter this behavior:
shopt -s nocaseglob. See https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/The-Shopt-Builtin.html for more options.alias downloads=“cd ~/Downloads”
edit: but if you want to get freaky in bash, alias downloads=“pushd ~/Downloads”
probably works in some other shells too
Sorta. If you put a FAT32 disk or sd card into a Linux system and mount it, it will ignore case because of the way the filenames are stored in that filesystem. However, there are a lot of important features you lose working on filesystems like that, so really it should be reserved for sneakernet with other operating systems.
I’ve kind of just accepted this is one of the differences between Linux and Windows that we as users need to understand is OS-specific.
You can use casefold option on ext4.
I guess you could use an ntfs filesystem… Or if you just mean for autocompletion, I’ve found that if there’s no completions matching e.g.
readmethen zsh will autocompleteREADME. But I’d say case sensitivity of files is a feature not a bug. People use it to make files starting with a capital letter appear at the top of a list of files in a directory.Symlink ?
@nocturne
if you use #fishshell, it’ll autocomplete to “Downloads”