I was recently looking for a script to recursively change all files and directories to lowercase. Unfortunately, I use this only often enough to where when I need it again, I'm at a different job and don't have my old machine (and thus the script I found or re-wrote). This time I found an old snippet by the honorable vroom and modified it a bit to be recursive and non-interactive: 

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

my $base = shift @ARGV;
$base ||= ".";
lc_filenames($base);

sub lc_filenames{
    my($dir)=@_;
    $dir||="."; 
    opendir DIR, $dir;
    while(defined(my $file=readdir DIR)){
        if ($file =~ /^\.+$/) {next}
        if(-f ("$dir/$file")){
            if($file=~/[A-Z]/){
                my $newname=lc($file);
                rename("$dir/$file","$dir/$newname");
            }
        } elsif(-d ("$dir/$file")){
            if($file=~/[A-Z]/){
                my $newname=lc($file);

            rename("$dir/$file","$dir/$newname");
                $file = $newname;
            }
            lc_filenames("$dir/$file");
        }
    }
}

[download]
My problem is that once the subroutine calls itself then returns, it doesn't seem to continue reading the directory. I think I ran into this a long while back, but I can't remember for the life of me what the problem is.

In reply to problems returning from recursive subroutine by melguin

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.