How to convert filenames or text to lowercase on the shell

There is no simple tolower command on the bash, but with a little shell script you can convert uppercase characters to lowercase. The script uses the tr command internally for converting the chars.

Create a shell script with the name tolower:

vi /usr/local/bin/tolower

and enter the following content:

#!/bin/sh
echo $1 | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'

Then make the script executable:

chmod +x /usr/local/bin/tolower

An test it by executing this command on the shell:

tolower "Thats a Test"

will convert the string to lowercase and show the result on the shell:

thats a test