(python) recursively remove capitalisation from directory structure?

Question

uppercase letters - what's the point of them? all they give you is rsi.

i'd like to remove as much capitalisation as possible from my directory structure. how would i write a script to do this in python?

it should recursively parse a specified directory, identify the file/folder names with capital letters and rename them in lowercase.

Answer 1

os.walk is great for doing recursive stuff with the filesystem.

import os


def lowercase_rename(folder):
    # renames all subforders of folder, not including folder itself
    def rename_all(root, items):
        for name in items:
            try:
                os.rename(os.path.join(root, name), os.path.join(root, name.lower()))
            except OSError:
                pass  # can't rename it, so what

    # starts from the bottom so paths further up remain valid after renaming
    for root, dirs, files in os.walk(folder, topdown=False):
        rename_all(root, dirs)
        rename_all(root, files)

The point of walking the tree upwards is that when you have a directory structure like '/A/B' you will have path '/A' during the recursion too. Now, if you start from the top, you'd rename /A to /a first, thus invalidating the /A/B path. On the other hand, when you start from the bottom and rename /A/B to /A/b first, it doesn't affect any other paths.

Actually you could use os.walk for top-down too, but that's (slightly) more complicated.