bash scripting capitalizing first letter or each word in a string

hypexr · 12-19-2004, 06:19 PM

I am looking for a way to capitalize the first letter of each word that is in a string in bash. I know how to make a letter or string upper or lower case but I do not know how to break apart a string and do this just on the first character. Any help is much appreciated.

niknah · 12-19-2004, 06:37 PM

A="asdf asdf asdf";
for i in $A; do B=`echo "${i:0:1}" | tr a-z A-Z`${i:1}; echo -n "$B "; done

what is considered a "space" in bash is controled by the IFS variable.

homey · 12-19-2004, 11:09 PM

I had better luck with this setup.
A="abcdef abcdef abcdef";
for i in $A; do B=`echo -n "${i:0:1}" | tr "[:lower:]" "[:upper:]"`; echo -n "${B}${i:1} "; done

hypexr · 12-19-2004, 11:45 PM

Amazing.

Thanks for the help!

fieldlab · 01-23-2011, 03:01 AM

Of course it's very simple to capitalize entire strings:

Code:

echo "string" | tr [:lower:] [:upper:]

in csh (freebsd), you have do silly things like escape characters:

Code:

echo "string" | tr \[\:lower\:\] \[\:upper\:\]

and instead of just

Code:

@bsd> A="string"

, you would

Code:

@bsd> set A="string"

everToulouse · 01-23-2011, 04:44 AM

bash4 should be able to do so using ${parameter^^pattern}

using an array

Code:

A="abcdef abcdef abcdef"
B=( $A )
echo "${B[@]^}"
Abcdef Abcdef Abcdef

Farliec · 06-16-2011, 09:58 AM

Thank you everToulouse ! Exactly what I was looking for ^^