for starters: i'm also a "techie-techie guy", dealing with linux since mid 90s. =)
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don’t know about you, but i simply love one-line solutions! yesterday i wrote a relatively long text about a topic that haunts us every now and then – even though the motivation of those who think a military coup would solve our problems is somehow understandable, i should say that no dictatorship of any kind is a feasible way out. (but i digress…)
so… i’ve got used to write in small caps – this dates from the very beginning of the Internet in here (circa 96). besides, at that time the utf-8 and other encoding standards were not mature as they are today – remember the ascii ribbon campaign?
the problem: how to convert every first letter of the sentences to upper case? i knew the capabilities of the command tr, which – among many other functionalities – performs this translation. however, it would fail to tackle the issue, given i had a pattern: “. [:alpha:]”.
here comes the winner! sed! you just have to prefix the pattern you want to use with the corresponding option: \L for lower case, \U for upper. then:
$ cat aa
aaa. bbbbb. cccc. ddddd. eeeee.
$ sed 's/^\(.\)/\U\1/; s/\. \(.\)/. \U\1/g' aa
Aaa. Bbbbb. Cccc. Ddddd. Eeeee.
i love this sh*t! haha! xD
btw, drop a comment if you are aware of another way of doing it! ;)