Shell – change entire directory tree to lower-case names

case sensitivityshell

I'm working on a website conversion. The files as they were linked and served from the web server were case insensitive. But, I've made a dump of the site on my linux system and I'm writing scripts to migrate data. The problem is that I'm running into case sensitivity problems between link strings in the pages and the actual word case on the file system.

For instance, a page might have a link like <a href='/subfolder/PageName.asp'> while the actual file is /subfolder/pagename.asp. Likewise with images — <img src='spacer_sm.gif'> might be Spacer_Sm.gif.

So my thought is to change all directory and filenames to their lower-case equivalents for the site download. How do I do this (and might there be a better way?)

Even if there are unix commands that have case-insensitve switches, I'm using php, so not all of the filesystem commands there have options for case sensitivity.

Best Answer

I don't know whether your unix-flavor has a rename. Many Linuxes have, and it is part of a perl-package, if you search for a repository.

find ./ -depth -exec rename -n 'y/[A-Z]/[a-z]/' {} ";"

Above version with

rename -n

doesn't really perform the action, but only print what would be done. You omit the -n to do it for real.

Related Solutions

Case-insensitive search of duplicate file-names

If you have GNU utilities (or at least a set that can deal with zero-terminated lines) available, another answer has a great method:

find . -maxdepth 1 -print0 | sort -z | uniq -diz

Note: the output will have zero-terminated strings; the tool you use to further process it should be able to handle that.

In the absence of tools that deal with zero-terminated lines, or if you want to make sure your code works in environments where such tools are not available, you need a small script:

#!/bin/sh
for f in *; do
  find . -maxdepth 1 -iname ./"$f" -exec echo \; | wc -l | while read count; do
    [ $count -gt 1 ] && echo $f
  done
done

What is this madness? See this answer for an explanation of the techniques that make this safe for crazy filenames.

Case-preserving search and replace in vim

There isn't a native feature of :s that does this as far as I know, but if you're willing to install add-ons, you could look at Michael Geddes' keepcase plugin.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Case-insensitive search of duplicate file-names

Case-preserving search and replace in vim

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