Convert to Uppercase or Lowercase on Linux

There are many ways to convert a string to uppercase or lowercase in Linux. The most commonly used commands to change case are tr, sed and awk. Tr is the simplest command for this task.

From Bash 4, there are certain symbols which allows to convert the string case.

In this guide, we learn how to convert the string to uppercase and lowercase on Linux.

Using TR to convert case

The tr command is used for translating and deleting characters. It can be used to convert a string or file content to uppercase or lowercase. Its is very commonly used in bash scripts.

[:upper:] or [A-Z] - indicate Uppercase

[:lower:] or [a-z] - indicate Lowercase

To convert any string from uppercase to lowercase, type:

tr [:upper:] [:lower:]

To convert any string from lowercase to uppercase, type:

tr a-z A-Z

For example to convert every letter in the string ''welcome' to capital letter, type:

$ echo welcome | tr [:lower:] [:upper:]

For example, lets use tr command in a bash script to convert a string to lower case

!/bin/bash
 y="WELCOME"
 val=$(echo $y | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]')
 string="$val linux"
 echo $string

To convert the content of the text file named file.txt from lower case to uppercase

$ tr a-z A-Z < ./file.txt

Vise versa to convert file content to lowercase, type

$ tr A-Z a-z < ./myfile.txt

Using SED to convert case

Sed command is used to Linux to parse and transform text. Using sed its possible to convert the case of the string.

Using sed, to convert string to upper case, type

echo  "hello world"  | sed 's/[a-z]/\U&/g'

[a-z] is the regular expression which will match lowercase letters. \U& is used to replace these lowercase letters with the uppercase version.

Now to change to lower case using the following command:

echo "HELLO WORLD " | sed 's/[A-Z]/\L&/g'

[A-Z] is the regular expression which will match uppercase letters. \L& is used to replace these uppercase letters with the lowercase version.

To convert text from file to uppercase using command line tool sed, we use the following pattern:

$ sed 's/[a-z]/\U&/g' < ./myfile.txt

Can also use the expression 's/.*/\L&/g' for the same.

Using AWK to convert case

The awk command uses tolower and toupper functions to convert a string case.

To convert a string to uppercase, type

string="hello world"
echo "$string" | awk '{print toupper($0)}'

To convert the all contents in a text file named file.txt to uppercase, use:

$ awk '{ print toupper($0) }' ./file.txt

Likewise to convert to lowercase, use:

$ awk '{print tolower($0)}' ./file.txt

Convert case using symbols in Bash

From Bash version 4, a new feature was introduced to convert the case of the string.

Example 1:

Convert first character of the string using ^ symbol:

$ note='welcome'
$ echo $note
$ echo ${note^}

Example 2:

Convert whole bash variable to Upper case using ^^ symbol:

$ note='welcome'
$ echo $note
$ echo ${note^^}

Example 3:

Convert to lowercase using ,, symbol:

$ note='WELCOME'
$ echo ${note,,}

Conclusion

In this guide, we learned how to convert to uppercase or lowercase in Linux. If you have any questions, we are happy to clarify them for you.

If this resource helped you, let us know your care by a Thanks Tweet. Tweet a thanks

Did you find this article helpful?

We are glad you liked the article. Share with your friends.

Sorry about that.

How can we improve it?