How to Convert All File Names in a Directory to Lowercase in Linux and MacOS?

To convert all file names in a folder to lowercase, you can use the following shell script. This script will iterate through each file in the specified directory and rename it to its lowercase equivalent.

Here is a simple script to achieve this:

#!/bin/bash

# Check if a directory argument is provided
if [ -z "$1" ]; then
  echo "Usage: $0 /path/to/your/folder"
  exit 1
fi

# Assign the first argument to a variable
DIR=$1

# Check if the provided argument is a valid directory
if [ ! -d "$DIR" ]; then
  echo "Error: $DIR is not a valid directory."
  exit 1
fi

# Navigate to the specified directory
cd "$DIR" || exit

# Loop through all files in the directory
for file in *; do
  # Check if the file name is not already in lowercase
  lc_file=$(echo "$file" | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]')
  if [ "$file" != "$lc_file" ]; then
    # Rename the file to its lowercase name
    mv "$file" "$lc_file"
  fi
done

echo "All file names in $DIR have been converted to lowercase."

Steps to Use the Script

1. Save the script to a file, e.g., lowercase.sh.
2. Give the script execution permissions using the command: chmod +x lowercase.sh.
3. Run the script with the directory path as an argument: ./lowercase.sh /path/to/your/folder.

Example Usage

If you have a directory /home/user/myfiles and you want to convert all file names in this directory to lowercase, you would run:

./lowercase.sh /home/user/myfiles

Additional Notes

• This script uses tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' to convert file names to lowercase, which is more portable across different Unix-like systems.
• Make sure to test the script on a sample directory to ensure it works as expected before using it on important files.