Yrurtj

When digging around in the advanced settings in Dropbox I lost a folder. I only discovered this about a month later. I managed to get this folder back from Dropbox however the file structure of the subfolders have changed dramatically. The current folder now contains two versions of each original subfolder. Currently it looks like this:

folder

  /folder1

    /folder11

      /folder111

      /Folder111

       /file1111

       /file1112

       /file1113

    /Folder11

      /file111

      /file112

    /folder12

    /Folder12

  /folder2

  /folder3  

So I have lowercase subfolders and I have BumpyCase subfolders. The lowercase subfolders contain subsubfolders and the BumpyCase subfolders contain files. The subsubfolders again contain a lowercase and a BumpyCase version of their respective subfolders. And this story goes on for several levels deep.

Fortunately there is no duplication in files, only in folders (same letters but different casing). So on each level I need to merge folders which differ only in the casing of names. And to do this correctly I need to start at the deepest level and work myself up to the top level folder.

I want everything to go into the CamelCase directories.

The partition where the data is is an Ext4 partition. I have access to several NTFS partitions.

Is there a handy Linux command/tool or someone with an idea for a script which could accomplish this? I'm already very happy that I got my stuff back, but the current structure is a big inconvenience.

All commands start from the toplevel directory and assume that you have no newlines in file names. I assume GNU tools (Linux or Cygwin). Warning, this is all untested code, typed directly into the browser.

It's fairly easy to merge all directories to lowercase. One approach is to recurse over all directories and merge them into their lowercase counterpart. Do the traversal depth first so that when you merge two directories, their content is already normalized.

find . -depth -name '*[[:upper:]]*' -type d -execdir sh -c '

  source=$0

  target=$(echo "$source" | tr "[:upper:]" "[:lower:]")

  if [ "$source" != "$target" ]; then  # need to rename or merge

    if [ -d "$target" ]; then

      # merge $source (mixed- or uppercase) into $target (lowercase)

      find "$source" -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -exec mv -bt "$target" {} +

      rmdir "$source"

    else

      mv "$source" "$target"

    fi

  fi

' {} ;

If you want to merge from lowercase to mixed case, you need to determine the mixed-case directory corresponding to each lowercase directory. The following snippet picks an arbitrary mixed-case directory if there is more than one.

find . -depth ! -name '*[[:upper:]]*' -type d -execdir sh -c '

  source=$0

  target=$(find . -maxdepth 1 -iname "$source" -not -name "$source" -print -quit)

  if [ -n "$target" ]; then …

  fi

' {} ;

I had the same problem and found a practical solution.

Just go to your Dropbox account and rename your root folders with lowercase names and download them again!

I read elsewhere that Dropbox has an issue with folders and case insensitivity. I am not sure if having folder uppercase names was the only problem. I had other issues that may affect Dropbox file system beyond folders with capital letters, such as sharing the folders from a Mac and trying to download them in an Ubuntu machine. But the problem I found was similar to the one reported here. All the folders were seen correctly on the web server but when downloaded all folders starting with uppercase letter were duplicated and some content went to the folders with uppercase and some content to the folders with lowercase, so I was looking for a way around to merge those folders.