[SOLVED] Characters to hex

Issue

I need some help in Shell scripting. I have a folder with single-letter folder names starting with 1 and ending with the small letter z: [1-9A-Za-z]. Now, I want to rename the folders to its hexadecimal value: 1 to 31 ... z to 7A.

I wanted to fix this with a for loop, but now I'm stuck here. I had never programmed with Shell, but with C and ASM.

[Edit]: Open your Terminfo folder. On OS X (10.9.1): /usr/share/terminfo. There you can see hex values. Now, on my iPhone, they are in single ASCII characters. Therefore the terminal can't find any file.

Solution

In any appropriate directory, you can try:

$ mkdir terminfo
$ cd terminfo
$ mkdir {0..9} {a..z}
$ ls
0   3   6   9   c   f   i   l   o   r   u   x
1   4   7   a   d   g   j   m   p   s   v   y
2   5   8   b   e   h   k   n   q   t   w   z
$ for d in ?; do mv "$d" $(printf "%2X" "'$d'"); done
$ ls
30  33  36  39  63  66  69  6C  6F  72  75  78
31  34  37  61  64  67  6A  6D  70  73  76  79
32  35  38  62  65  68  6B  6E  71  74  77  7A
$

If you use echo mv instead of just mv, you can see the operations the shell does. You can use %2x in place of %2X to get names like 7a, which matches what I see in /usr/share/terminfo on my machine (but the file system is case-preserving and case-insensitive, so the upper-case should work). You might also consider using ln -s instead of mv; that way, you have both the old names and the new names available, so old code and new code should be happy.

Tested on Mac OS X 10.9.1 Mavericks.

Answered By - Jonathan Leffler

Answer Checked By - Clifford M. (WPSolving Volunteer)