Console Command Examples

Linux specific console command examples

Examples from other pages included. References also included. This document is in the form of "what you want to do" and "how to do it" taken from our old Linux forum with questions from linux users.

change file case UPPERCASE to lowercase in the same directory

The easiest way is this simple command which uses rename:

rename 'y/A-Z/a-z/' *

Another example using tr:

for i in *; do mv $i `echo $i | tr [:upper:] [:lower:]`; done

Shell script example from the old Advanced Shell Operations page

for FILE in *                        # use mv -i to avoid overwriting files
do                                   # uses the tr command to convert case
  mv -i "$FILE" `echo "$FILE" | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]'` 2> /dev/null
done

These may fail on unsupported file systems such as FAT32 with an error such as:

mv: 'IMAG0001.JPG' and 'imag0001.jpg' are the same file
./IMAG0004.JPG not renamed: ./imag0004.jpg already exists

In this case you will have to move when you change case and move back again. Here we will change an uppercase file extension to a lowercase one under FAT32

rename 's/\.JPG$/\.jpeg/' *.JPG
rename 's/\.jpeg$/\.jpg/' *.jpeg

There are plenty of other ways to accomplish such tasks.

Related Pages

If what you're looking for isn't on this page, try some of these related pages:

• Console Command Examples
• Advanced Shell Operations
• Console Command Reference
• How Do I: A Linux Q&A