Mac Geekery

What standard app can be used to change the selected text to all lower case?
None of: TextEdit, Pages, Xcode, OmniOutlinerPro.
What about the BSD tools? Doesn’t look like vi can do it, no obvious tools in the man pages.
Sed? Awk? Suggestions?

JC I thought about doing this in Perl, because I’m a dork that way. awk is the right tool for the job, though. And it’s easy.

The -f technically implores awk to take input from a file, but I find that the script will still take STDIO through pipes on the command line, making this script rather multipurpose.

#!/usr/bin/awk -f
{ print tolower($0); }

Sorry, we don’t give out iTunes for one liners. Unless it’s a really cool one-liner. Then we’ll think about it. This one’s t3h l4me. For the record, UNIX commands (“BSD tools”) are never capitalized, even when they lead a sentance.

codepoet So, to be more clear: take the above one-liner and save it in a file, mark it executable, and then invoke it. I saved it as tolower in my personal bin directory and then you’d use it with a filename as input:

./tolower filename.txt > filename-lower.txt