An annoying thing with the Mac terminal is that, out of the box, the tab completion* is case sensitive. Perhaps in linux land this is ok because most things are kept lower case. But, many default folders in Mac Os X start with upper-case letters (Desktop, Pictures, Public, etc). So, to turn off the case-sensitive completion, simply type this on the command line:

> echo "set completion-ignore-case On" >> ~/.inputrc

Be sure to start a new terminal instance for the changes to take effect.


* (Tab completion is when you start typing a folder or file in the terminal/console and hit tab, it auto completes to any matches it finds. Very handy and if you don't already use it, you should!)

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Comments

Anonymous
Long time linux users here. We use case insensitive tab complete all the time.
Anonymous
youre gay
Prasanth
great. This was one of the features which got me wondering ... How come windows CMD has it but Bash doesn't . This is just what I needed
Anonymous
Thanks a bunch! :)
Mish
Nice. Thanks for the tip, and case insensitive makes sense for Macs @Costas because the filesystem is case insensitive as well.
Stefan
@Costas: That's incorrect; this will work on any system with bash as the shell, the default for most Unices.
Costas
Dude, if you're at a unix prompt on OSX, maybe it's time to get used to a case sensitive shell because if you go to Linux or any other flavour of Unix you'll not be afforded said luxury of a case insensitive shell.

Time to man up and hit the shift key :)