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I've found this question and answer about renaming "Downloads": How do I rename the Downloads folder (in Lion)? but it seems concerned more with how things look the the Finder. I do not care how things look to the Finder, I just think directories with capital letters annoying in ls output.

This is a case insensitive filesystem, why can't I use lower case names? Something is stopping me when I try to rename or delete, eg, "Downloads".

$ mv Downloads downloads
mv: rename Downloads to downloads: Permission denied
$ rmdir Downloads
rmdir: Downloads: Permission denied
$ mv Downloads foobar
mv: rename Downloads to foobar: Permission denied

I have not escalated to sudo because I suspect the above is a hint that things will break unless I do it the right way. Linux gives me the XDG user directories configuration as the "right way" to rename these "standard" (but kinda useless to me) directories. What's the Mac version of this?

This is largely about esthetics and I don't want to fix it with symlinks. And I don't really care if GUI stuff sees it as "downloads" or "Downloads" (which is close to that previous question) I want the directories renamed to lower case as seen by the Unix side of the interface: mv down*/*pdf project/docs/ type stuff should work, and cd; mv */recent-file some/where/else/ should not expand to cd; mv Downloads/recent-file downloads/recent-file some/where/else/ which is what I'd get with a symlink.

This is 10.15.7 ("Catalina")

Cupcake Protocol
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  • On my machine, I can cd downloads and it goes into the Downloads folder, since APFS is case-insensitive by default. Is this good enough? I know your needs are personal preference of course just thought I'd offer this up. – Ezekiel Nov 13 '20 at 19:17
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    The shell is not case sensitive even though the filesystem is. cd down* fails, because the shell can't find anything starting with down nor an exact down*. – Cupcake Protocol Nov 13 '20 at 19:23
  • Generally speaking macOS doesn't allow moving, deleting or renaming directories it considers a necessary part of macOS. That includes all the folders placed, by default, in all User folders. There are ways around this and plenty of solutions right here on AD. It just depends on how much trouble you want to go through to "fix" your issue. – Steve Chambers Nov 13 '20 at 20:07
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    Is this not a Unix system? "Folders" are a Finder thing. Directories are what the shell uses. I don't care what the Finder does. I don't know what I should be searching for, and the obvious words are so common I get lots of bogus results. Can you point me to some of the solutions "right here"? – Cupcake Protocol Nov 13 '20 at 20:11
  • Folders and directories are just different words to refer to the same thing - you can't rename these folders because they're considered to be owned and controlled by the system, unfortunately. However you can try to identify ways to change the behavior of cd down* (since cd downloads works, it stands to reason there's a way to achieve this). Alternatively, you could investigate something with symbolic links of some fashion, but I'm unsure if that would even work. – Ezekiel Nov 13 '20 at 22:01
  • Folders are what the Finder has. The linked question explains how to rename the folders, but not the directories. I don't want to hack the source of every program that does globbing to make globbing case insensitive. Perhaps you have heard of the horrors that await if you turn on case sensitivity in the Mac filesystem? Those are the horrors that await trying to make globbing case insensitive on the Unix side. I want to change the name (or even just delete) these directories with capital letters. This place is called "Ask Different", I and want different. – Cupcake Protocol Nov 13 '20 at 22:21

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