How do you force a string into proper case in a Unix shell script? (That is to say, capitalise the first letter and make the rest lower case). Bash4 has a special feature for doing it, but I’d avoid using it because, well, I want to be Unix/POSIX compatible.
It’s actually very easy once you’ve realised tr won’t do it all for you. The tr utility has no concept on where in the input stream it is, but combining tr with cut works a treat.
I came across this problem when I was writing a few lines to automatically create directory layouts for interpreted languages (in this case the Laminas framework). Languages of this type like capitalisation of class names, but other names have be lower case.
Before I get started, I note about expressing character ranges in tr. Unfortunately different systems have done it in different ways. The following examples assume BSD Unix (and POSIX). Unix System V required ranges to be in square brackets – e.g. A-Z becomes “[A-Z]”. And the quotes are absolutely necessary to stop the shell globing once you’ve introduced the square brackets!
Also, if you’re using a strange character set, consider using \[:lower:\] and \[:upper:\] instead of A-Z if your version of tr supports it (most do). It’s more compatible with foreign character sets although I’d argue it’s not so easy on the eye!
Anyway, these examples use A-Z to specify ASCII characters 0x41 to 0x5A – adjust to suit your tr if your Unix is really old.
To convert a string ($1) into lower case, use this:
lower=$(echo $1 | tr A-Z a-z)
To convert it into upper case, use the reverse:
upper=$(echo $1 | tr a-z A-Z)
To capitalise the first letter and force the rest to lower case, split using cut and force the first character to be upper and the rest lower:
proper=$(echo $1 | cut -c 1 | tr a-z A-Z)$(echo $1 | cut -c 2- | tr A-Z a-z)
A safer version would be:
proper=$(echo $1 | cut -c 1 | tr "[:lower:]" "[:upper:]")$(echo $1 | cut -c 2- | tr "[:upper:]" [":lower:"])
This is tested on FreeBSD in /bin/sh, but should work on all BSD and bash-based Linux systems using international character sets.
You could, if you wanted to, use sed to split up a multi-word string and change each word to proper case, but I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader.