How to Rename All Folders and Files to Lowercase on Linux

How do I rename all folders and files to lowercase on Linux?

A concise version using the "rename" command:

find my_root_dir -depth -exec rename 's/(.*)\/([^\/]*)/$1\/\L$2/' {} \;

This avoids problems with directories being renamed before files and trying to move files into non-existing directories (e.g. "A/A" into "a/a").

Or, a more verbose version without using "rename".

for SRC in `find my_root_dir -depth`
do
    DST=`dirname "${SRC}"`/`basename "${SRC}" | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]'`
    if [ "${SRC}" != "${DST}" ]
    then
        [ ! -e "${DST}" ] && mv -T "${SRC}" "${DST}" || echo "${SRC} was not renamed"
    fi
done

P.S.

The latter allows more flexibility with the move command (for example, "svn mv").

How to change filenames to lowercase?

for file in *; do
    [[ -f "$file" ]] && mv "$file" "${file,,}" 2>/dev/null
done

I'm not sure what version of bash introduced the ${var,,} expansion.

How to rename only the parent folder to lowercase using command line?

You can tweak it like this:

cd file_groups

find . -type d -maxdepth 1 -exec rename 's/(.*)/\L$1/' {} \;

-maxdepth 1 will only go one level deep to find directories

Convert folder and file names to camel case

You can use the regular expression aptitude to deal with upper and lower case translations, regarding your current local collation (LC_ALL, check with the locale command).

If your filename's "words" are separated with a space and are all in lower case, you can use a simple shell script like this :

#!/bin/sh
while read -r FILENAME ; do
  NEWNAME="`echo \"${FILENAME}\" | sed 's/  *\([^ ]\)/\u\1/g'`"
  if [ ! "${NEWNAME}" ] ; then
    NEWNAME="${FILENAME}";
  fi
  if [ "${FILENAME}" = "${NEWNAME}" ]; then
    printf "No change : %s\\n" "${FILENAME}" >&2;
  else
    if [ -e "${NEWNAME}" ] ; then
      printf "Already changed : %s => %s\\n" "${FILENAME}" "${NEWNAME}" >&2;
    else
      echo "mv \"${FILENAME}\" \"${NEWNAME}\"";
    fi
  fi
done

Remove the echo on echo "mv \"${FILENAME}\" \"${NEWNAME}\""; to do the mv.

Note that it should work fine with accented letters or any unicode letter having lower and upper code.

The script takes the file list to operate from stdin, so to use it "as is", you can use something like the following examples :

• find . -type 'f' | theScript.sh

  For a whole tree of files.
  For folders, you'll have to operate them separately. List them and sort them in a descending order.

• ls -1 | theScript.sh

  For files in the current folder.

If your files may have all or partial upper cases at start and you look to force them entirely to camel case, you can change the line :

  NEWNAME="`echo \"${FILENAME}\" | sed 's/  *\([^ ]\)/\u\1/g'`"

With:

  NEWNAME="\`echo \"${FILENAME}\" | sed 's/\(.*\)/\l\1/;s/  *\([^ ]\)/\u\1/g'\`"

rename all the files in the current directory whose name conatains upper-case into all lower case

You are not passing any data into the tr program, and you are not capturing any output either.

If you are using sh:

for f in *[A-Z]*
do
    if [ -f "$f" ]; then
        new_name=$(echo "$f"|tr 'A-Z' 'a-z')
        mv "$f" "$new_name"
    fi
done

Note the indentation - it makes code easier to read.

If you are using bash there is no need to use an external program like tr, you can use bash expansion:

for f in *[A-Z]*
do
    if [[ -f $f ]]; then
        new_name=${f,,*}
        mv "$f" "$new_name"
    fi
done

Change filenames to lowercase in Ubuntu in all subdirectories

Here's one way using find and tr:

for i in $(find . -type f -name "*[A-Z]*"); do mv "$i" "$(echo $i | tr A-Z a-z)"; done

Edit; added: -name "*[A-Z]*"

This ensures that only files with capital letters are found. For example, if files with only lowercase letters are found and moved to the same file, mv will display the are the same file error.

How can i find and rename multiple files

Possible solution with Perl rename:

find /mydir -depth -type f -exec rename -v 's/(.*\/)?([^.]*)/$1\U$2/' {} +

---

The commands in the question have several problems.

You seem to confuse the syntax of find's -exec action and xargs.

find /mydir -depth -type f -exec rename -v 'substitution_command' {} \;

find /mydir -depth -type f| xargs -n 1 rename -v 'substitution_command'

The xargs version has problems in case a file name contains a space.

If you replace \; with +, multiple file names are passed to one invocation of rename.

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The substitution command is only supported by the Perl version of the rename command. You might have to install this version. See Get the Perl rename utility instead of the built-in rename

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The substitution did not work in my test. I successfully used

rename -v 's/(.*\/)?([^.]*)/$1\U$2/' file ...

The first group (.*\/)? optionally matches a sequence of characters with a trailing /. This is used to copy the directory unchanged.

The second group ([^.]*) matches a sequence of characters except ..

This is the file name part before the first dot (if any) which will be converted to uppercase. In case the file name has more than one extension, all will remain unchanged, e.g.

Path/To/Foo.Bar.Baz -> Path/To/FOO.Bar.Baz

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