How can I make autocomplete in the shell work with case-folding?

Question

How can I make the autocompletion for files and folders in the bash shell work case-insensitively?

Ideally, cd ~/doc + tab autocompletes to cd ~/Documents (correcting the case as it autocompletes), but if that's not possible autocompleting to cd ~/documents is acceptable too.

Answer 1

You can do that by typing the following command in the terminal:

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

if you want to go back to the original behavior you have the open that file and remove the line.

The file ~/.inputrc file deals with mapping the keyboard for specific situations. This file is the start-up file used by Readline, the input-related library used by Bash, perl and most other open source programs.

The configuration options in .inputrc are particularly useful for customising the way Tab-completion works, e.g. with the ls command

When a program which uses the Readline library starts up, the init file is read, and the key bindings are set.

You can find more information about the file syntax here.