linux bash, camel case string to separate by dash

Question

Is there a way to convert something like this:

MyDirectoryFileLine

to

my-directory-file-line

I found some ways to convert all letters to uppercase or lowercase, but not in that way; any ideas?

Answer 1

You can use s/([A-Z])/-L1/g to find an upper case letter and replace it with a dash and it's lower case. However, this gives you a dash at the beginning of the line, so you need another sed expression to handle that.

This should work:

sed --expression 's/([A-Z])/-L1/g' 
    --expression 's/^-//'              
    <<< "MyDirectoryFileLine"