On a Linux mailing list near me a user asked: 

  I have a list of company names all in upper case; one per line.
  Can I use a combination of sed, tr, and other tools to automate
  converting them all to mixed case (i.e., initial letter uppercase,
  all others lower case)? There must be a shell script already
  written to do this, but not in the reference books I have.

[download]

I immediately blasted out a knee jerk reply: 

   perl -ne 'print ucfirst lc;' FILENAME
   will do it.

[download]

And then proceeded to read the answers others had provided.

Some suggestions caused me to wonder where the virtue of Laziness is hiding: 

   perl -pe 'tr/A-Z/a-z/; s/(\S+)/\u$1/g;' <filename>

[download]

Others reminded me to think before posting 

   My sed-fu was deficient I guess (or my sed was) so I fell back to p
+erl:

   If you want word-case
   perl -pe 's/ \b (\w) ([^\s]+) \b /\1\L\2/gx'

   # ONE COMPANY  -> One Company (rather than One company)

[download]

Oh, yes, multi word company names. How ... almost all the blathering time.

So I went back to redo my original and came up with: 

   perl -i -ne 's/(\b\w)/{uc $1}/eg; print;' <FILENAME>

[download]

Which I'm content with. But...can you come up with something better?

There is one nit I have with that solution. RUN4LIFE translates to Run4life rather than Run4Life. My reading of `man perlre` doesn't turn up a \ code for alpha only. The systems I have available to me at the moment don't support [:class:] for trying that out.

Be Appropriate && Follow Your Curiosity

In reply to Case Munging by mikeraz

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