Renaming files

Sometimes you acquire a collection of files that are stupidly named. I'm running into that at the moment with all my recent downloading of old DOS games and ROM images. Unlike Windows, Linux is case sensitive and sometimes it's easier to keep everything in lower (or upper) case.

Here's a quick perl hack that'll do this for every file in the current directory.

ls | perl -lne 'print "mv $_ ",lc($_)'

Warning: If you have a maliciously named file, like RM\ -RF *, you'll run into serious problems because you might actually execute this command.

Typing the above at the command line will give you a chance to look over the results, but it won't actually do anything to your files. If you like what you see, then do the same command again, but suffix it with | sh like this.

ls | perl -lne 'print "mv $_ ",lc($_)' | sh

Change lc to uc to convert everything to UPPER CASE.

Here's an example:

galoot@breezy:~/Images/temp$ ls                                              
NUBLU.GIF  PERIODIC_TABLE.PNG  UBUNTU_BUTTON_88X31.PNG  YOUR_ASS_IS_GRASS.JPG
galoot@breezy:~/Images/temp$ ls | perl -lne 'print "mv $_ ",lc($_)'          
mv NUBLU.GIF nublu.gif                                                       
mv PERIODIC_TABLE.PNG periodic_table.png                                     
mv UBUNTU_BUTTON_88X31.PNG ubuntu_button_88x31.png                           
mv YOUR_ASS_IS_GRASS.JPG your_ass_is_grass.jpg                               
galoot@breezy:~/Images/temp$ ls | perl -lne 'print "mv $_ ",lc($_)' | sh     
galoot@breezy:~/Images/temp$ ls                                              
nublu.gif  periodic_table.png  ubuntu_button_88x31.png  your_ass_is_grass.jpg

This little perl script isn't mine.

If you want to see what the command will do to a large directory before you commit to the changes, you can pipe it through "less" like this:

ls | perl -lne 'print "mv $_ ",lc($_)' | less

(Edit: This doesn't handle filenames with spaces in them. Can one of you hackers improve it?)