Lowercasing all directories under a directory

Question

I want to lowercase every directories' name under a directory. With which commands can I do that?

Answer 1

All the directories at one level, or recursively?

Zsh

At one level:

autoload zmv
zmv -o-i -Q 'root/(*)(/)' 'root/${1:l}'

Recursively:

zmv -o-i -Q 'root/(**/)(*)(/)' 'root/$1${2:l}'

Explanations: zmv renames files matching a pattern according to the given replacement text. -o-i passes the -i option to each mv command under the hood (see below). In the replacement text, $1, $2, etc, are the successive parenthesized groups in the pattern. ** means all (sub)*directories, recursively. The final (/) is not a parenthesized group but a glob qualifier meaning to match only directories. ${2:l} converts $2 to lowercase.

Portable

At one level:

for x in root/*/; do mv -i "$x" "$(printf %s "$x" | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]')"; done

The final / restricts the matching to directories, and mv -i makes it ask for confirmation in case of a collision. Remove the -i to overwrite in case of a collision, and use yes n | for …. to not be prompted and not perform any renaming that would collide.

Recursively:

find root/* -depth -type d -exec sh -c '
    t=${0%/*}/$(printf %s "${0##*/}" | tr "[:upper:]" "[:lower:]");
    [ "$t" = "$0" ] || mv -i "$0" "$t"
' {} \;

The use of -depth ensures that deeply nested directories are processed before their ancestors. The name processing relies on there being a /; if you want to call operate in the current directory, use ./* (adapting the shell script to cope with . or * is left as an exercise for the reader).

Perl rename

Here I use the Perl rename script that Debian and Ubuntu ship as /usr/bin/prename (typically available as rename as well). At one level:

rename 's!/([^/]*/?)$!\L/$1!' root/*/

Recursively, with bash ≥4 or zsh:

shopt -s globstar  # only in bash
rename 's!/([^/]*/?)$!\L/$1!' root/**/*/

Recursively, portably:

find root -depth -type d -exec rename -n 's!/([^/]*/?)$!\L/$1!' {} +

Answer 2

There isn't a single command that will do that, but you can do something like this:

for fd in */; do
  #get lower case version
  fd_lower=$(printf %s "$fd" | tr A-Z a-z)
  #if it wasn't already lowercase, move it.
  [ "$fd" != "$fd_lower" ] && mv "$fd" "$fd_lower"
done

If you need it to be robust, you should account for when there is already two directories that differ only in case.

As a one-liner:

for fd in */; do fd_lower=$(printf %s "$fd" | tr A-Z a-z) && [ "$fd" != "$fd_lower" ] && mv "$fd" "$fd_lower"; done

Answer 3

find -execdir rename

This renames files and directories with a regular expression affecting only basenames.

So for a prefix you could do:

PATH=/usr/bin find . -depth -execdir rename 's/(.*)/\L$1/' '{}' \;

or to affect files only:

PATH=/usr/bin find . -type f -execdir rename 's/(.*)/\L$1/' '{}' \;

-execdir first cds into the directory before executing only on the basename.

I have explained it in more detail at: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16541582/find-multiple-files-and-rename-them-in-linux/54163971#54163971

Answer 4

I took this as a one-liner challenge :) First, establish a test case:

$ for d in foo Bar eVe; do mkdir -p dcthis/$d; touch dcthis/a${d}.txt; done
$ ls dcthis/
Bar     aBar.txt    aeVe.txt    afoo.txt    eVe     foo

I use find to spot the directories with uppercase letters and then downcase them via sh -c 'mv {} echo {} | tr [:upper:] [:lower:]'. Guess using sh -c is a bit hack-ish, but my head always explodes when I try escaping things for find directly.

$ (cd dcthis && find . -maxdepth 1 -type d -path '*[A-Z]*' -exec sh -c 'mv {} `echo {} | tr [:upper:] [:lower:]`' \;)
$ ls dcthis/
aBar.txt    aeVe.txt    afoo.txt    bar     eve     foo

Be warned: This solution does not check whether downcasing leads to collisions!