how to remove capital letters and blanks?

Vincent · 05-12-2004, 09:25 AM

Hi,
at the moment I am moving my music and documents from the windows partition to the linux partition.
There are many files containing blanks and capitals which can cause problems with the bash.

Is it possible to convert them automatically into something linux-friendly via script?

ranger_nemo · 05-12-2004, 09:46 AM

I've had one for a few years...

Code:

#!/usr/bin/python

import os, string, re

for fname in os.listdir(os.curdir):
  newname = string.lower(fname)
  newname = re.sub("\s", "_", newname)
  newname = re.sub("_-_", "_", newname)
  newname = re.sub("\'", "-", newname)
  os.rename(fname, newname)

Make a file in ~/bin , put the above code in it, then "chmod u+x filename". To run it, cd to the directory with all the MP3s, and run "filename". It worked, and I never used it too often, so I never updated it to be able to add a directory to the command... "filename ~/mp3s/".

<< EDIT >>

If you want to change it a bit...

The string.lower changes the filename to all lowercase characters.

First re.sub replaces spaces with underscores.
Second replaces a underscore-hyphen-underscore with a single underscore.
Third replaces single-quotes with a hypen.

ranger_nemo · 05-12-2004, 08:30 PM

Oops... I forgot to add...

Copyright (C) 2004 -- Ranger Nemo

The above script is free software... You can use / modify / distribute it under the terms of the GNU General Public License. You can find a copy of the GPL on either www.gnu.org or www.fsf.org.

The above script was written with the hopes that it will be useful, but has no warranty... Not even an implied warranty of fitness for use. Use it at your own risk.

bluej · 05-13-2004, 04:36 AM

below is a shell script that does the job.
it converts all uppercase letter to lowercase, and replaces spaces with underscores.
parameter of the script are the files you want to rename.

cheers

#!/bin/sh
#

for oldname in $@; do
newname=`echo $oldname | tr 'A-Z ' 'a-z_'`
test "$newname" != "$oldname" && mv -v $i $newname
done

rob19 · 07-10-2004, 05:02 AM

I know this is an older post now but I tried the shell script from bluej and got an error. I had to replace $i with $oldname as follows:

Code:

#!/bin/sh
#

for oldname in $@; do
newname=`echo $oldname | tr 'A-Z ' 'a-z_'`
test "$newname" != "$oldname" && mv -v $oldname $newname
done

Incase anybody else (newbies) come across this post by searching the archives like I did.

grimse · 05-16-2005, 02:15 PM

hello erverybody.
if i try to convert data located under my mounted fat32 partition i always get the message "file x and file y are the same", but there`s no renamed file in the folder. converting files within / works fine.
has anyone a idea what`s my error?