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

Question

I have to rename a complete folder tree recursively so that no uppercase letter appears anywhere  it s C   source code  but that shouldn t matter    Bonus points for ignoring CVS and Subversion version control files folders  The preferred way would be a shell script  since a shell should be available on any Linux box   There were some valid arguments about details of the file renaming    I think files with the same lowercase names should be overwritten  it s the user s problem  When checked out on a case-ignoring file system  it would overwrite the first one with the latter  too  I would consider A-Z characters and transform them to a-z  everything else is just calling for problems  at least with source code   The script would be needed to run a build on a Linux system  so I think changes to CVS or Subversion version control files should be omitted  After all  it s just a scratch checkout  Maybe an  export  is more appropriate

User · Answer

None of the solutions here worked for me because I was on a system that didn't have access to the perl rename script, plus some of the files included spaces. However, I found a variant that works:

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

Credit goes to "Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'", see this answer on the similar question "change entire directory tree to lower-case names" on the Unix & Linux StackExchange.

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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      amp  amp  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

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This works nicely on macOS too   ruby -e  Dir      each    p  File rename p  p downcase

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The simplest approach I found on Mac nbsp OS nbsp X  was to use the rename package from http   plasmasturm org code rename    brew install rename rename --force --lower-case --nows        --force Rename even when a file with the destination name already exists       --lower-case Convert file names to all lower case       --nows Replace all sequences of whitespace in the filename with single underscore characters

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find YOURDIR -type d   sort -r    find yourdir -type f     grep -v  CVS   grep -v  SVN   while read f  do mv -v  f  echo  f   tr   A-Z     a-z     done   First rename the directories bottom up sort -r  where -depth is not available   then the files  Then grep -v  CVS instead of find    -prune because it s simpler  For large directories  for f in     can overflow some shell buffers  Use find       while read to avoid that   And yes  this will clobber files which differ only in case

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Smaller still I quite like   rename  y A-Z a-z       On case insensitive filesystems such as OS X s HFS   you will want to add the -f flag   rename -f  y A-Z a-z

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This is a small shell script that does what you requested   root directory    1 -please specify parent directory   do it          awk    lc  tolower  0   if  lc     0  print  mv       0         lc           sh     first the folders find   root directory  -depth -type d   do it find   root directory    -type d   do it   Note the -depth action in the first find

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Not portable  Zsh only  but pretty concise   First  make sure zmv is loaded   autoload -U zmv   Also  make sure extendedglob is on   setopt extendedglob   Then use   zmv           CVS    CVS     1    L 2     To recursively lowercase files and directories where the name is not CVS

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This works if you already have or set up the rename command  e g  through brew install in Mac    rename --lower-case --force somedir

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find   -depth -name    A-Z    sed -n  s                mv -n -v -T  1 2  1 L 2 p  sh   I haven t tried the more elaborate scripts mentioned here  but none of the single commandline versions worked for me on my Synology NAS  rename is not available  and many of the variations of find fail because it seems to stick to the older name of the already renamed path  eg  if it finds   FOO followed by   FOO BAR  renaming   FOO to   foo will still continue to list   FOO BAR even though that path is no longer valid   Above command worked for me without any issues   What follows is an explanation of each part of the command     find   -depth -name    A-Z      This will find any file from the current directory  change   to whatever directory you want to process   using a depth-first search  eg   it will list   foo bar before   foo   but only for files that contain an uppercase character  The -name filter only applies to the base file name  not the full path  So this will list   FOO BAR but not   FOO bar  This is ok  as we don t want to rename   FOO bar  We want to rename   FOO though  but that one is listed later on  this is why -depth is important    This comand in itself is particularly useful to finding the files that you want to rename in the first place  Use this after the complete rename command to search for files that still haven t been replaced because of file name collisions or errors     sed -n  s                mv -n -v -T  1 2  1 L 2 p    This part reads the files outputted by find and formats them in a mv command using a regular expression  The -n option stops sed from printing the input  and the p command in the search-and-replace regex outputs the replaced text   The regex itself consists of two captures  the part up until the last    which is the directory of the file   and the filename itself  The directory is left intact  but the filename is transformed to lowercase  So  if find outputs   FOO BAR  it will become mv -n -v -T   FOO BAR   FOO bar  The -n option of mv makes sure existing lowercase files are not overwritten  The -v option makes mv output every change that it makes  or doesn t make - if   FOO bar already exists  it outputs something like   FOO BAR - gt    FOO BAR  noting that no change has been made   The -T is very important here - it treats the target file as a directory  This will make sure that   FOO BAR isn t moved into   FOO bar if that directory happens to exist   Use this together with find to generate a list of commands that will be executed  handy to verify what will be done without actually doing it     sh   This pretty self-explanatory  It routes all the generated mv commands to the shell interpreter  You can replace it with bash or any shell of your liking

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Slugify Rename  regex   It is not exactly what the OP asked for  but what I was hoping to find on this page   A  slugify  version for renaming files so they are similar to URLs  i e  only include alphanumeric  dots  and dashes    rename  s   a-zA-Z0-9     - g  filename

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This works on CentOS Red Hat Linux or other distributions without the rename Perl script   for i in    ls   grep  A-Z     do mv -i   i    echo  i   tr  A-Z   a-z     done   Source  Rename all file names from uppercase to lowercase characters   In some distributions the default rename command comes from util-linux  and that is a different  incompatible tool

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One-liner  for F in K   do NEWNAME   echo  quot  F quot    tr    upper       lower      mv  quot  F quot   quot  NEWNAME quot   done  Note that this will convert only files directories starting with letter K  so adjust accordingly

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Lengthy But  Works With No Surprises  amp  No Installations   This script handles filenames with spaces  quotes  other unusual characters and Unicode  works on case insensitive filesystems and most Unix-y environments that have bash and awk installed  i e  almost all   It also reports collisions if any  leaving the filename in uppercase  and of course renames both files  amp  directories and works recursively  Finally it s highly adaptable  you can tweak the find command to target the files dirs you wish and you can tweak awk to do other name manipulations  Note that by  handles Unicode  I mean that it will indeed convert their case  not ignore them like answers that use tr      adapt the following command  IF  you want to deal with specific files dirs find   -depth -mindepth 1 -exec bash -c     for file do       adapt the awk command if you wish to rename to something other than lowercase     newname   dirname   file     basename   file    awk   print tolower   0         if     file       newname      then           the extra step with the temp filename is for case-insensitive filesystems         if     -e   newname     amp  amp      -e   newname lcrnm tmp      then            mv -T   file    newname lcrnm tmp   amp  amp  mv -T   newname lcrnm tmp    newname           else            echo  ERROR  Name already exists   newname          fi     fi       done   sh          References  My script is based on these excellent answers   https   unix stackexchange com questions 9496 looping-through-files-with-spaces-in-the-names  How to convert a string to lower case in Bash

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Use typeset   typeset -l new          Always lowercase find  topPoint          Not using xargs to make this more readable   while read old   do new   old           new is a lowercase version of  old      mv   old    new    Quotes for those annoying embedded spaces   done   On Windows  emulations  like Git Bash  may fail because Windows isn t case-sensitive under the hood  For those  add a step that mv s the file to another name first  like   old tmp   and then to  new

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Most of the answers above are dangerous  because they do not deal with names containing odd characters  Your safest bet for this kind of thing is to use find s -print0 option  which will terminate filenames with ASCII NUL instead of  n   Here is a script  which only alter files and not directory names so as not to confuse find   find    -type f -print0   xargs -0n 1 bash -c    s   dirname   0     basename   0    d   dirname   0     basename   0  tr   A-Z     a-z     mv -f   s    d     I tested it  and it works with filenames containing spaces  all kinds of quotes  etc  This is important because if you run  as root  one of those other scripts on a tree that includes the file created by  touch     echo  hacker  0 0 hacker      057  root      057  bin     057  bash       well guess what

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Just simply try the following if you don t need to care about efficiency   zip -r foo zip foo   unzip -LL foo zip

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I needed to do this on a Cygwin setup on Windows 7 and found that I got syntax errors with the suggestions from above that I tried  though I may have missed a working option   However  this solution straight from Ubuntu forums worked out of the can  -   ls   while read upName  do loName  echo    upName     tr    upper       lower      mv   upName    loName   done    NB  I had previously replaced whitespace with underscores using   for f in       do mv   f     f         done

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If you use Arch Linux  you can install rename  package from AUR that provides the renamexm command as  usr bin renamexm executable and a manual page along with it   It is a really powerful tool to quickly rename files and directories   Convert to lowercase  rename -l Developers mp3   or --lowcase   Convert to UPPER case  rename -u developers mp3   or --upcase  long option   Other options  -R --recursive   directory and its children  -t --test   Dry run  output but don t rename  -o --owner   Change file owner as well to user specified  -v --verbose   Output what file is renamed and its new name  -s str str2   Substitute string on pattern  --yes   Confirm all actions   You can fetch the sample Developers mp3 file from here  if needed

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With MacOS   Install the rename package   brew install rename   Use   find   -iname    py  -type f   xargs -I  rename -c -f                               This command find all the files with a   py extension and converts the filenames to lower case    f  - forces a rename   For example     find   -iname    py  -type f   sample Sample File py   sample file py   find   -iname    py  -type f   xargs -I  rename -c -f        find   -iname    py  -type f   sample sample file py   sample file py

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Using Larry Wall s filename fixer    op   shift or die  help  chomp  ARGV    lt STDIN gt   unless  ARGV  for   ARGV         was           eval  op      die    if         rename  was     unless  was eq         It s as simple as  find   fix  tr A-Z a-z      where fix is of course the script above

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for f in  find -depth   do mv   f    f      done   find -depth prints each file and directory  with a directory s contents printed before the directory itself    f    lowercases the file name

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The original question asked for ignoring SVN and CVS directories  which can be done by adding -prune to the find command  E g to ignore CVS   find   -name CVS -prune -o -exec mv       echo      tr   A-Z     a-z       -print    edit  I tried this out  and embedding the lower-case translation inside the find didn t work for reasons I don t actually understand  So  amend this to     gt  cat  gt  tolower    bin bash mv  1  echo  1   tr    upper       lower      D   gt  chmod u x tolower    gt  find   -name CVS -prune -o -exec tolower            Ian

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Man  you guys gals like to over complicate  things    Use    rename  y A-Z a-z

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for f in  find   do mv -v   f    echo  f   tr   A-Z     a-z      done

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I would reach for Python in this situation  to avoid optimistically assuming paths without spaces or slashes  I ve also found that python2 tends to be installed in more places than rename      usr bin env python2 import sys  os  def rename dir directory     print  DEBUG  rename   directory           Rename current directory if needed   os rename directory  directory lower      directory   directory lower        Rename children   for fn in os listdir directory       path   os path join directory  fn      os rename path  path lower        path   path lower          Rename children within  if this child is a directory     if os path isdir path           rename dir path     Run program  using the first argument passed to this Python script as the name of the folder rename dir sys argv 1

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Here s my suboptimal solution  using a Bash shell script      bin bash   First  rename all folders for f in  find   -depth   -name CVS -type d   do    g  dirname   f    basename   f    tr   A-Z     a-z       if    xxx f      xxx g     then       echo  Renaming folder  f        mv -f   f    g     fi done    Now  rename all files for f in  find     -type d   do    g  dirname   f    basename   f    tr   A-Z     a-z       if    xxx f      xxx g     then       echo  Renaming file  f        mv -f   f    g     fi done   Folders are all renamed correctly  and mv isn t asking questions when permissions don t match  and CVS folders are not renamed  CVS control files inside that folder are still renamed  unfortunately    Since  find -depth  and  find   sort -r  both return the folder list in a usable order for renaming  I preferred using  -depth  for searching folders

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In OS X  mv -f shows  same file  error  so I rename twice   for i in  find   -name     -type f  grep -e   A-Z     do j  echo  i   tr   A-Z     a-z     sed s  -1      mv  i  i-1  mv  i-1  j  done

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

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