case insensitive grep (aka ignoring case)

“Grepping” a stream of data is a powerful way to cut through the noise (I’ve written previously about its role in digging through git logs for example). Unfortunately, it’s rather sensitive. It’s sensitive to case - at least by default. I ran into this problem recently looking through my launchctl list to see where Postgres was running (it seemed I had multiple instances based on behavior). The odd part was that when I looked, I saw nothing:

$ launchctl list | grep postgres
$

Sadness. But the facts didn’t add up, so I gave up on grep for a moment and inspected the list the old fashioned way - manually and line-by-line.

$ launchctl list
PID Status Label
901 0 com.apple.trustd.agent
- 0 com.apple.MailServiceAgent
- 0 com.apple.mdworker.mail
26910 -9 com.apple.FileProvider
...
58969 0 homebrew.mxcl.PostgreSQL
...

Pay dirt! There it was in all its glory. Process 58969. So why hadn’t it shown up? It was Postgres, not postgres.

That’s solvable! I just needed to tell grep to ignore the case, for which it has a --ignore-case flag or -i for short. Trying the search again, armed with this information:

$ launchctl list | grep -i postgres
58969 0 homebrew.mxcl.PostgreSQL

Et voilá! Now I can get on with my day.