topic Re: Character set in Operating System - HP-UX

Character set

peterchu — Thu, 07 Jul 2005 10:55:46 GMT

If there are 500 files in a path, all file name are 8 characters and with block letter and lowercase eg. T3aXvb6i , T3deK3s3 , how to change all characters to lowercase ? thx

Re: Character set

A. Clay Stephenson — Thu, 07 Jul 2005 11:05:04 GMT

A script something like this (after cd'ing to desired directory):

#!/usr/bin/sh
ls | while read FNAME
do
NEW_FNAME=$(echo "${FNAME}" | tr "[A-Z]" "[a-z]")
if [[ -e "${NEW_FNAME}" ]]
then
echo "File \"${NEW_FNAME}\" already exists. Cannot convert." >&2
else
mv "${FNAME}" "${NEW_NAME}"
fi
done

Re: Character set

melvyn burnard — Thu, 07 Jul 2005 11:06:04 GMT

use the tr command, for example:
tr "[:upper:]" "[:lower:]" file2

see the man page for tr

Re: Character set

A. Clay Stephenson — Thu, 07 Jul 2005 11:06:28 GMT

Ooops,
mv "${FNAME}" "${NEW_NAME}"
should be:
mv "${FNAME}" "${NEW_FNAME}"

Re: Character set

Alan Meyer_4 — Thu, 07 Jul 2005 11:10:19 GMT

Here's the script

#! /bin/ksh
ls * |while read FILE ;do
LFILE=`echo $FILE |tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]'`
mv $FILE $LFILE
done

Re: Character set

A. Clay Stephenson — Thu, 07 Jul 2005 11:15:41 GMT

Actually, it's rather important to quote both the old and new filenames because your existing filenames might contain whitespace (though discouraged, those pesky spaces are perfectly legal in UNIX pathnames) and without quoting your script just exploded. Also, it's rather important to check for the existence of the new filename before renaming the old one or you just lost data.

Re: Character set

Alan Meyer_4 — Thu, 07 Jul 2005 11:19:12 GMT

I must defer to Mr Stephenson on this issue as well as the check to see if the new filename exists statement. Very good job.