rename script won't change uppercase to lowercase on fat32

pwc101 · 09-27-2006, 10:42 AM

I'm not sure if the reason it's not working is because it's a fat32 partition, but it seems to work ok on the reiserfs partitions I've got. This is the script:

Code:

#! /bin/sh

# converting space to underscores ({i// /_}) and uppercase to lowercase 
# (tr "[:upper:]" "[:lower:]")

for i in *
do mv "$i" "$(echo ${i// /_} | tr "[:upper:]" "[:lower:]")"
done

if I try a manual mv, I get the same error:

Code:

mv: cannot move `Summer_2002' to a subdirectory of itself, `summer_2002/Summer_2002'

for a directory, and

Code:

mv: `Seignosse 001.avi' and `seignosse 001.avi' are the same file

for a file.

Is this because it's fat32? Is there any way around this?

edit: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=160202 this thread seems to suggest that it's a problem with the way the partition is mounted?

druuna · 09-27-2006, 11:05 AM

Hi,

Too my knowledge FAT32 (MS based) does not distinguish between upper and lowercase. So this seems to be a FS type problem.

Maybe this will help to explain in more detail: FAT

It doesn't help, but hopefully it clears things up a bit.

exvor · 09-27-2006, 11:17 AM

Yes druuna fat32 does not make any distiction between upper and lowercase file names. NTFS does but thats because its a non dos filesystem. This is indeed a file system limitation.

pwc101 · 09-27-2006, 11:26 AM

from that other thread I found, it seems that if you mount the drive in a particular manner, it's possible to get it to distinguish between upper and lowercase. This is the reply to the OPs question in the other thread (by the OP I might add!...):

none /mnt/win_f supermount dev=/dev/sda1,fs=vfat,--,shortname=win95,umask=0,codepage=850,iocharset=iso8859-1,kudzu 0 0

I'm not exactly sure what it's supposed to be, but it looks suspiciously like an fstab entry to me... any thoughts?

pwc101 · 09-27-2006, 05:16 PM

ok, I've had an idea.

I can tell it to rename a file called "Test" to "Test.temp" without it complaining. Ok, good. I can then tell it to rename that "Test.temp" file to "test" (note lowercase first letter), and it holds the case. It seems that only by going through this intermediate stage of calling it something different can I get it to rename a file to lowercase letters.

So, with that in mind, I've tried the following:

Code:

#! /bin/sh

# testing some ideas for renaming scripts...

# remove all spaces from the filenames first
for i in *
        do mv "$i" "${i// /_}"
done

# create a list of the directory contents, and turn it into a lowercase file list
ls -1 $PWD | tr "*/" " " | tr "A-Z" "a-z" > $PWD/list

# then rename all the folders in the current directory to original_name.temp
for i in $PWD/*
        do mv "$i" "$i.temp"
done

# then, rename the files called original_name.temp to the lowercase name from the list file
#for i in `ls -1 | tr "*/" " "`
#       do mv "$i" "$(cat list.temp)"
#done

# try to rename the files from the list.temp file using a foreach loop
#for i in *
#       do foreach j=`cat list.temp`
#               mv "$i" "$j" 
#       done
#done

# or create a new variable which contains the list of the cat'ed list.temp. 
# For this, you'll need two loops
#for i in *
#       for j in `cat list.temp`
#       do mv "$i" "$j"
#       done
#done

# multiple do's within a for...
for i in *
        do NAME=`cat list.temp` && {
                mv $i $NAME
        }
done

what I'm trying to do is use the contents of a file (list.temp) as the input for the mv command i.e. the new filename. However, what happens when I cat the contents of list.temp in the loop is the first file the for loop comes across gets renamed to all the files in the list, so rather than having say 10 individial file, I get one file renamed with all 10 original filnames, separated by \n. I can't for the life of me figure out how to get it to just use one line of the list.temp file for each cycle through the loop.

I thought maybe a "while" might need to be involved at some point...