change the case sensitivity of pathname completion in bash

I don't like bash being case-sensitive when cd to different directories because when there are upper-case letters in directory names usually either the capslock or the shift key has to be pressed which slows speed of switching paths. Thus in all my boxes where bash exists(linux machines, cygwin on windows boxes & my macbook running Snow Leopard) I have set up the ~/.inputrc file to contain this line to turn off the case-sensitivity:

set completion-ignore-case on

But there were cases that I'm using somebody else's bash shell instead of my own, which does not disable that case-sensitivity and would cause inconvenience for me(yes, to some extent). And today an idea occurred to me that bash may very likely support some kind of volatile switching this feature on and off. So I tried `man bash` and found a rather ugly solution:

1. create a tmp file, let's say "/tmp/inputrc" and type that line above in it.
2. in this bash shell, set the $iNPUTRC env variable by type in the command `export INPUTRC=/tmp/inputrc`
3. also in this bash shell, press the keybinding C-x C-r(which runs the readline command "re-read-init-file") to load the setting just typed in.

and now this bash shell is enabled with case-insensitivy.

It's rather a tedious and ugly solution.

PS: I tried to run this command

set completion-ignore-case on

in the bash shell as described in this cyberciti page. But it proved no effect at all.

fix the M-. behavior in iTerm under Snow Leopard

I found that one of my favorite keyboard shortcuts refused to work, after my MB has been upgraded to the Snow Leopard. That striking keybinding is "M-.", which used to bring the last argument of the most recently committed bash command to the cursor's very position on bash's input line(thanks to libreadline, which provides this feature and other which are similar to those keybinding in Emacs[God's editor, yes]), now will introduce a "≥" symbol instead in iTerm.

iTerm is more user-friendly than the Terminal.app which is originally contained in Leopard and Snow Leopard. For example I can use Command+1, Command+2 to switch to different tabs in iTerm(and I know that GNU Screen can sometimes make the tabs useless and unnecessary, but consider that what if I'm connected to several remote hosts via ssh?), which may not be possible(or at least not easy to do so) in Terminal.app. And that's why I feel that life sucks when forced to use the Terminal.

I had thought that it's because the iTerm is too old to work with SL, because that version was released in April, 2009 and it indeed worked smoothly in Leopard. So I decided to wait for a newer version of iTerm. And today when the newer version comes. I can't help to upgrade it, with full expectation that it will solve that problem(M-. does not work as it did). But, I was made disappointed because, it DOES NOT work like that!

OK. Maybe I have to turn to some other dirty way. I first tried to use the mapping function in iTerm to deceive bash that whenever the M-. is pressed it should be taken as the right keycode to bring up the last argument of the last bash command. but I failed because, the "xev" program reported the same keycodes in both iTerm and Terminal(remember that M-. works as _I_ expected in Terminal).

Then, I remembered that I had once made some customized keybindings in bash via the ~/.inputrc file under Linux, which controls mappings between keyboard inputs and what bash see. With even no expectation that it will work, I put this line:

"≥": yank-last-arg

into my ~/.inputrc.

After iTerm's relaunch, M-. succeeds to just emit the last argument... which I have longed for about 4 weeks.

bash io redirection

About the difference between

ls > dirlist 2>&1
and
ls 2>&1 > dirlist

请下载ps版本(blogger把我的ascii图给弄乱了)