Help me get my FILE NAMES back to normal file names.

April 16, 2004 1:18 PM

Let's say that you have a directory with 100+ files that the file names have been accidentally converted to ALL CAPS (my portable hard drive did that for some crazy reason), and you want to convert them all back to lower case file names. Is there an easier way than "right click/rename/type the whole name in lower case"?
posted by maceo to computers & internet (13 comments total)

Which platform are you on? If Windows...
posted by dobbs at 1:22 PM on April 16, 2004

good question... Windows. And thank you, that looks like it will do the job nicely.
posted by maceo at 1:25 PM on April 16, 2004

[a href="http://www.publicspace.net/windows.html"]better file rename[/a]
posted by skwm at 1:37 PM on April 16, 2004

Whoops, sorry, I'm not on the orange + blue.
Here's that link again:
better file rename
posted by skwm at 1:37 PM on April 16, 2004

hahah DURR
posted by pigasus at 2:03 PM on April 16, 2004

boh!
posted by the_ill_gino at 2:59 PM on April 16, 2004

If you have Perl installed, it's pretty simple:

perl -e 'for $file (</my/directory/*>) { rename($file, lc($file)) }'

Or thereabouts.
posted by majcher at 3:31 PM on April 16, 2004

On OSX, this is a built-in applescript.
posted by jragon at 5:42 PM on April 16, 2004

(in case any mac user sees this thread in the future) :)
posted by jragon at 5:43 PM on April 16, 2004

I'm skeptical about your hard drive being the cause of this. Did you move the drive from one system to another?
posted by rdr at 7:15 PM on April 16, 2004

rdr, yes
posted by maceo at 11:46 PM on April 16, 2004

I've had this happen, too. Depends on file system. In my case, moving stuff from FAT32 hard drive to an external USB hard drive did it.
posted by tranquileye at 5:00 AM on April 17, 2004

Renamer is nice too and free.
posted by toothless joe at 10:39 AM on April 17, 2004