mjhjmtu

I was looking for a script that changes the filename and directory name to lowercase and replaces any white spaces with "-". I managed to find the script below inside another script but I do not fully understand how it works. I would really appreciate it if someone could walk me through it.

find ./* -depth -type d -exec sh -c '
t=$0%/*/$(printf %s "$0##*/" | tr "[:upper:]" "[:lower:]");
[ "$t" = "$0" ] || mv -i "$0" "$t"
' ;

find ./* -depth -type d -exec sh -c ' ... ' ;

finds all directories (-type d) in the tree and runs that shell snippet for each of them, with $0 set to the current name. -depth makes it process the contents of each directory first, and the directory itself last. (otherwise the renaming messes things up.)

t=$0%/*/$(printf %s "$0##*/" | tr "[:upper:]" "[:lower:]");

$0%/* removes the last slash and everything after it from $0, i.e. leaves the directory name. $0##*/ is basically the opposite. (They're types of parameter expansion) The printf | tr is used to change the final part of the name to lower case. The result is assigned to t. ($(...) is command substitution)

[ "$t" = "$0" ] || mv -i "$0" "$t"

Tests to see if the new name in t and the old name in $0 are the same, and if not, then calls mv on them.

The silly parts here are that find could be called just as find . -depth ..., there's no need for the filename wildcard (find ./*) since finding the file names is what find does. If they used -execdir instead of -exec, there would be no need to deal with the directory part of the file names. And using $0 for the target file name is a bit bad form, it's meant for the name of the script itself.

You mentioned renaming files and directories, and changing whitespace to dashes. As far as I can see, the command here does neither. find -type d only catches directories, you'd need to use -type f to catch only regular files, or leave it out to ignore the type. Also, there's nothing about whitespace in the tr, but you could change it to, say tr "[:upper:][:space:]" "[:lower:][-*]" to also change all whitespace to dashes.

I would use larry walls rename, it is available on many distros. Including Debian, and probably derivatives.

rename -E 's/-//g' -E 's/(.*)/L$1/g' *

First expression search and replaces - with nothing. second expression search and replaces everything (.*) with the same thing $1 but converted to lowercase L

The script you present does some things to extract the directory and changes it to lowercase. There is no change of white space to -.

To change space to - and lowercase the string, sed works fine:

sed -e 's/[[:space:]]/-/g' -e 's/(.*)/L1/'

So, this script should work:

find ./* -depth -type d -execdir sh -c '
t=$(printf %s "$1" | sed -e 's/[[:space:]]/-/g' -e "s/(.*)/L1/")
[ "$t" = "$1" ] || echo mv -i "$1" "$t"
' sh ;

Using -depth and -execdir avoids the need to extract the dir name.

The type d limits the selected elements to only directories.