Change filename from lowercase to uppercase recursively

Question

I have 1,000,000 files in some folders and subfolders. I want to rename them from lowercase to uppercase using shell commands. I don't want to modify the extension. only filename part.

I have found this one:

rename 's/^([^.]*)\.(.*)$/\U$1\E.$2/' *

but it is not recursive and only works on files in current folder.

Then I tried this one:

find . -depth  -execdir rename 's/^([^.]*)\.(.*)$/\U$1\E.$2/' {} \;

But no files changed.

How can I use it recursively?

And your shell is…? See your shell's manual to find out whether it supports ** syntax in globbing. bash (with globstar turned on) and zsh does. — manatwork, Jul 24 '13 at 10:37
If possible, you should backup your files before running anything. — , Jul 24 '13 at 14:17
See also Renaming files to have lower case extensions with 'rename' and Lowercasing all directories under a directory for other methods of changing the case of file names. — Gilles 'SO- stop being evil', Jul 25 '13 at 02:00
Obligatory 'Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I'll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems.' but with a smattering of history that I'd not seen http://regex.info/blog/2006-09-15/247 — msw, Jul 25 '13 at 05:19

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 25 '13 at 01:59

3

Assuming that you have the Perl rename provided by Debian and derived distributions such as Debian and Ubuntu, you're almost there. The problem is that -execdir passes a file name prefixed with ./ to the command. (The reason for that is that some commands treat arguments starting with some characters specially; this way, if you have a file called -foo, it's passed as ./-foo and therefore treated as a file and not as an option.) With your regex, this results in $1 being always empty, and hence the new name is identical to the old name.

Accommodate for this ./ in your regular expression.

find . -depth  -execdir rename 's/^(\.\/[^.]*)\.(.*)$/\U$1\E.$2/' {} \;

answered Jul 25 '13 at 01:59

Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'

829,060

The above command fails on directory name with a dot(.) separator. ex : dir.xyz/abc.txt is being renamed to DIR.xyz/ABC.txt – Priya Jul 25 '13 at 05:00
It is ambiguous in the OP whether files or {files and directories} were to be changed. I read -type f and Giles infers the opposite. We're both wrong and both right. – msw Jul 25 '13 at 05:21
@Ameer rename will never be called with an argument of the form dir.xyz/abc.txt, because -execdir was used and not -exec. All the arguments to rename will be of the form ./SOMETHING where SOMETHING doesn't contain any slash. So dir.xyz will be renamed to DIR.xyz, which is consistent with the expressed requirements. Thanks to -depth, this happens after dir.xyz/abc.txt has been renamed to dir.xyz/ABC.txt, so there won't be a problem with find attempting to move into a directory that's been renamed without it knowing. – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Jul 25 '13 at 11:18

Priya · Answer 2 · 2013-07-24T10:19:50.777

0

find . -type f -exec rename -v 's/(\w+).(\w+)$/\U$1\E.$2/' {} \;

edited Jul 24 '13 at 10:19

answered Jul 24 '13 at 09:52

Priya

113

This is close to correct but it will fail on filenames with spaces or punctuation in them. It would also be a better answer if you explained why you are using -type. – msw Jul 24 '13 at 10:04
@msw What problem do you see with file names with whitespace? This will, however, fail on files in subdirectories that contain lowercase letters, as it will attempt to rename e.g. foo/bar.ext to FOO/BAR.ext (hd. used -execdir to work around this problem). – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Jul 24 '13 at 21:56
@Gilles , there is no fail with directory as -type f only gives the file path. and renames $1 & $2 only touches the files inside the dir. – Priya Jul 25 '13 at 05:01
@Giles I think you know the answer as you used the more inclusive pattern in your answer, but \w+ will not match test file or test-file and many other such likely names. It also uses . when it should have \.. Also since @Ameer commented while I was writing this, without -execdir you need to ensure that only the last path component is matched yielding (untested) s!/([^/]*)\.([^/]*)$!—! – msw Jul 25 '13 at 05:08

score 0 · Answer 3 · edited Sep 12 '18 at 17:50

0

You can use this little bash script.

#!/bin/bash

find . -type f -exec sh -c  '
    dn=`dirname "$1"`
    bn=`basename "$1"`
    fn=`echo "${bn%.*}"`
    ext=`echo "${bn##*.}"`
    FN=`echo "${fn^^}"`
    newfn="${FN}"."${ext}"
    #echo ${dn}/$newfn
    if [ "${fn}" = "${FN}" ] ;then : ;else echo "${bn} renamed to ${newfn}";mv "$1" "${dn}/${newfn}";fi
' _ {} \;

edited Sep 12 '18 at 17:50

Community

1

answered Jul 24 '13 at 12:20

Luis

2,518

And how will that traverse the directory structure recursively, as requested in the question? – manatwork Jul 24 '13 at 12:22
@manatwork: This new script takes into consideration the subdir part of the question that I overlooked before. – Luis Jul 24 '13 at 12:36
1

Ok, it works fine now. But why you use fn=\echo "${bn%.}"`` instead of `fn="${bn%.}"`? – manatwork Jul 24 '13 at 12:46

score -1 · Answer 4 · answered Jul 24 '13 at 09:35

-1

ls -r | rename 's/^([^.]*)\.(.*)$/\U$1\E.$2/'

Is this OK?

answered Jul 24 '13 at 09:35

mi-chang

9

never use ls for anything – frostschutz Jul 24 '13 at 10:29
3

Except listing the contents of filesystems? I find find -maxdepth 1 -ls to be a bit of a nuisance for that. ;) But joking temporarily aside, parsing ls is a baaaad idea unless you're doing something very constrained and well-defined. And probably not even then. – Alexios Jul 24 '13 at 11:14
Wondering who upvoted a ls call with --reverse instead of --recursive? – manatwork Jul 24 '13 at 12:43

Change filename from lowercase to uppercase recursively

4 Answers4