Case insensitive exists()?

[Roy Smith]

In article <mailman.5853.1390438708.18130.python-list at python.org>,
 Larry Martell <larry.martell at gmail.com> wrote:

> I have the need to check for a files existence against a string, but I
> need to do case-insensitively. I cannot efficiently get the name of
> every file in the dir and compare each with my string using lower(),
> as I have 100's of strings to check for, each in a different dir, and
> each dir can have 100's of files in it.

I'm not quite sure what you're asking.  Do you need to match the 
filename, or find the string in the contents of the file?  I'm going to 
assume you're asking the former.

One way or another, you need to iterate over all the directories and get 
all the filenames in each.  The time to do that is going to totally 
swamp any processing you do in terms of converting to lower case and 
comparing to some set of strings.

I would put all my strings into a set, then use os.walk() traverse the 
directories and for each path os.walk() returns, do "path.lower() in 
strings".