Often you may want to use PowerShell to capitalize the first letter of each file in a folder.
You can use the following syntax to do so:
gci | foreach {
$NewName = (Get-Culture).TextInfo.ToTitleCase($_); ren $_.FullName $NewName}
This particular example will capitalize the first letter of each filename in the current directory.
Here is what the various commands do:
- gci: An alias for Get-ChildItem, this retrieves all files in the current directory.
- foreach: Specifies an action to perform on each file.
- (Get-Culture).TextInfo.ToTitleCase($_): Defines new name of file to be current name. displayed in title case, which capitalizes the first letter of each word in the filename.
- ren: An alias for Rename-Item, this renames the filename using the new name.
The following example shows how to use this syntax in practice.
Example: Capitalize First Letter of Each Filename in PowerShell
First, we can use the gci command (an alias for the Get-ChildItem cmdlet) to first view all filenames in our current directory:
We can see that there are three files in our current directory that all have lowercase filenames.
We can use the following syntax to capitalize the first letter of each filename:
gci | foreach {
$NewName = (Get-Culture).TextInfo.ToTitleCase($_); ren $_.FullName $NewName}
The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:
Notice that when we use the gci command again to view all of the files in the current directory that the first letter of each filename has been capitalized.
Note: You can find the complete documentation for the ToTitleCase() method here.
Related Tutorials
The following tutorials explain how to perform other common tasks in PowerShell:
PowerShell: How to Get File Name from Path
PowerShell: How to Add Date to File Name
PowerShell: How to Delete All Files with Specific Extension
