A.P. Lawrence

This article is from a FAQ concerning SCO operating systems. While some of the information may be applicable to any OS, or any Unix or Linux OS, it may be specific to SCO Xenix, Open Desktop or Openserver.

There is lots of Linux, Mac OS X and general Unix info elsewhere on this site: Search this site is the best way to find anything.

Unix, Xenix and ODT General FAQ

How can I change uppercase file names to lower case?

A simplistic script would be:

 #!/bin/sh
 for i in *
 do
 j=`echo $i | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]'`
 mv $i $j
 done

or in ksh:

 #!/bin/ksh
 typeset -l L
 for i in * do
 L=$i
 mv $i $L
 done

These are very simple, however: they aren't recursive (which means they won't descend into sub-directories) and, more importantly, they don't check to see if the lowercase name already exists.

A better program to do this is "xxu" available (C source) from http://columbia.edu/kermit/utils.html.