Convert upper case file names to lower case

[Bruce Baillie]

Our file system for users has always been lower case and we want to keep it that way. Some users have begun using upper case. Now I need to search the users area of the file system and rename all upper case files to lower case.
mv FILE `echo FILE | tr "[:upper:]" "[:lower:]"`
I know I can use tr to do the renaming, but what would be a good way to find the files.

[Bill McNAMARA_1]

this is quick.. is there not an isupper function. You could use that in awk..

[James R. Ferguson · Accepted solution]

Hi:

Try this:

# cd
# find . -xdev -type f -name "[[:upper:]]*"

This will list all files (not directories, since the 'find' specified only '-type f' that contain any uppercase characters in their names. You can do what you wish with the output.

Regards!

...JRF...

[someone_4]

Hi

If you want to find the files that are in a directory that that has lower case files mixed up with uppercase files this will work.

ls [A-Z]*


richard

[curt larson_1]

how about
typeset -l file
find . -type f |
while read File
do
file=$File
if [[ "$File" = "$file" ]] ;then
/usr/bin/true
else
mv $File $file
fi
done

of course this is only going to work if all
your directories are lowercase already

[Darren Prior]

Hi,

Just to be cautious I'd script this, and include a check to see if there's already a lower case version - otherwise it'll get overwritten.

regards,

Darren.

[Mark Greene_1]

Find is supposed to use the same regular expression compliance that tr does (see man find, man 5 regex). So, this form:

find . -name "[:upper:]" -type "f" -print

Should work, but I am getting mixed results on my 11.11 system. Ideally, you ought to be able to run this:

FILELIST=`find . -name "[:upper:]" -type "f" -print`
for FILENAME in `echo "$FILELIST"`; do
mv "$FILENAME" `echo "$FILENAME"|tr "[:upper:] "[:lower:]"`

and is should work. If it picks up a file that really is all lower case, it won't matter. Your bigger concern is ensuring it got all the upper case ones.

mark

[Mark Greene_1]

Darren is absolutely correct, so ignore what I wrote about getting lowercase files. If you move a file to itself, you'll end-up with a zero byte file (i.e., empty) file.

Sorry for missing that.

mark

[curt larson_1]

combining the find with a regular expression and a variable typeset to lowercase seems like a good way to go

typeset -l file

find . -xdev -type f -name "[:upper:]*" |
while read FILE
do
file="$FILE"
mv "$FILE" "$file"
done

[Bruce Baillie]

Thanks to James Ferguson, just what I was looking for. I will find all the files and creat a list for further processing.

find . -name "[[:upper:]]*" -print > list.txt