batch rename

[Dan Nelson]

In the last episode (Jan 05), Jeff Laine said:
> My goal is to rename several files in such a way as to decapitalize
> starting letters in their names. The solution seems to be simple but
> I'm stuck. What should I use? awk/sed or write some shell-script?

Best way is with ports/misc/mmv:
 
  mmv "?*" "=l1=2"

If you use zsh, you can use the zmv function to do the same thing:

 autoload -U zmv
 zmv '([A-Z])(*)' '${(L)1}$2'

Both of the above will detect filename collisions and tell you what
won't work.  If you know there aren't any collisions, you could do this
(zsh again):

 for i in [A-Z]* ; do
   mv $i ${i[1]:l}${i[2,-1]}
 done

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson at allantgroup.com