Question

I would like to write a filepath as a URI in a Unix command-line emulator.

Desired output:

file:///C|/directory/filename.ext

Using sed and pwd I can get close but not quite there because

$ pwd
/c/directory/

…gives me a lower-case drive and no pipe.

Is there a better way?

Answer 1

You can do it with sed; it has a y command to do the case-conversion, though it is somewhat convoluted because you would have to go through the hold space as well as the pattern space. It would be easier to use Perl – it probably has one or more modules to do this (such as URI and URI::file), though a simple version could be produced with regular expressions.

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use strict;
use warnings;
foreach my $name (@ARGV)
{
     if ($name =~ m%^/([a-zA-Z])(/.+)%)
     {
         printf "file:///%c|%s\n", uc($1), $2;
     }
     else
     {
         print STDERR "$0: unexpected name format - no /x/ drive letter prefix ($name)\n";
     }
 }

(Untested code.)