Arch Linux

tethys

Member

Registered: 2019-08-13

Posts: 168

[SOLVED] Strange behaviour of perl-rename

The following command for converting uppercase to lowercase in file names

perl-rename 'y/A-Z/a-z/' *.txt

does not work when run in a directory on a FAT32 USB-stick but it works when run in the home directory on an Ext4 partition.

When run with option -n (dry run), it works in both directories!

(The above command works only on text files, for example "NEW FILE.txt".)

Can somebody please check this? I am using the last version 1.16-1 of perl-rename.

Any ideas?

Last edited by tethys (2025-04-20 12:15:54)

WorMzy

Administrator

From: Scotland

Registered: 2010-06-16

Posts: 13,366

Website

Re: [SOLVED] Strange behaviour of perl-rename

This is a filesystem limitation -- FAT is case-insensitive, so 'aaa' and 'AAA' are the same file.

# touch aaa
# mv aaa AAA
mv: 'aaa' and 'AAA' are the same file

You will need to introduce a staging step. i.e. rename 'aaa' to 'AAA1', then rename 'AAA1' to 'AAA'.

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tethys

Member

Registered: 2019-08-13

Posts: 168

Re: [SOLVED] Strange behaviour of perl-rename

Oh, thank you WorMzy, that explains the strange behavior!