I'm trying to make a convenience function to fix issues when I accidentally have my caps locks on and am trying to run some case-sensitive tools.
e.g. I occasionally find myself typing MAKE DEBUG instead of make debug.
What I have now is pretty straightforward: alias MAKE="make" and editing the makefiles to duplicate the rules, e.g. DEBUG: debug.
I'd prefer a solution that works on the arguments, without having to modify the tools involved.
If you just want everything in your makefile to be in lowercase, you can use GNU sed to lowercase the whole thing:
sed -i 's/.*/\L&/' Makefile You could also build a sed script that's a little more discriminating, but the \L replacement escape is your friend.
Since you tagged your question with tr, you might also want a tr solution. It's a little more cumbersom, since tr won't do in-place translations, but you could shuffle temp files or use sponge from moreutils. For example:
tr '[[:upper:]]' '[[:lower:]]' < Makefile | sponge Makefile This involves a script, but avoids the Ctrl-D issue of my earlier attempt:
For each command, an alias like
alias MAKE="casefixer make" And then the following file, which I've created at /usr/local/bin/casefixer:
#!/bin/bash command=`echo $1 | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'` # convert 1st arg to lowercase, it's the command to invoke shift # remove 1st arg from $* $command `echo "$*" | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'` # convert arguments to lowercase, and invoke the command with them Playing on @Clayton Hughes' casefixer solution, here's a solution that'll handle funny things like spaces in arguments (which $* messes up):
casefixer() { eval "$(printf "%q " "$@" | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]')"; } alias MAKE='casefixer make' Note: eval is a fairly dangerous thing, with a well-deserved reputation for causing really bizarre bugs. In this case, however, the combination of double-quoting and encoding the command and its arguments with %q should prevent trouble. At least, I couldn't find a case where it did anything unexpected.
Here's one solution, though it's not perfect:
alias MAKE="make `tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]`" it works, but has the unfortunate problem that I need to press Ctrl-D to send an EOF before anything starts executing.
The readline command "downcase-word" (bound to M-u by default) is worth mentioning here. Suppose you typed "MAKE DEBUG". If you catch it before hitting return, you can move the cursor to the beginning of the line with C-a. (Otherwise, bring the command back first, using the up arrow). Then, each time you hit M-u, the word immediately after the cursor will be changed to lowercase, and the cursor will move to the beginning of the next word.
It's a little laborious, and I don't see a way to lowercase the entire line at once. Perhaps someone can improve on this.
M-9M-l (letter ell) will downcase the next 9 words. M-99M-l will downcase the next 99. M--M-l will downcase the previous one word. M--3M-l (release Alt before pressing 3 if you're using it instead of Esc) the previous 3. M-u is bound to upcase-word by default at least on my system.
X-x syntax mean? How would I enter it?