Question

We are running subversion on a Linux server. Someone in our organization overwrote about 3k files with mixed case when they need to all be lowercase.

This works in the CLI

rename 'y/A-Z/a-z/' *

But obviously will screw up subversion.

svn rename 'y/A-Z/a-z/' * 

Doesn’t work because subversion deals with renames differently I guess. So How can I do this as a batch job? I suck with CLI, so please explain it like I’m your parents. hand renaming all 3k files is not a task I wish to undertake.

Thanks

Answer 1

Create a little script svn-lowername.sh:

#!/bin/bash
# svn rename each supplied file with its lowercase
for src; do
    dst="$(dirname "$src")/$(basename "$src" | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]')"
    [ "$src" = "$dst" ] || svn rename "$src" "$dst"
done

Make sure to chmod +x svn-lowername.sh. Then execute:

How it works:

1. Loop over each supplied filename.
2. Basename part of filename is lowercased, directory part is left alone, using
   tr to do character by character translations. (If you need to support
   non-ASCII letters, you’ll need to make a more elaborate mapping.)
3. If source and destination filenames are the same we’re okay, otherwise, svn rename. (You could use an if statement instead, but for one-liner
   conditionals using || is pretty idiomatic.)

You can use this for all files in a directory:

./svn-lowername.sh *

…or if you want to do it recursively:

find -name .svn -prune -o -type f -print0 | xargs -0 ./svn-lowername.sh

If you think this problem might happen again, stash svn-lowername.sh in your
path somewhere (~/bin/ might be a good spot) and you can then lose the ./
prefix when running it.