Through terminal I can't access files or directories with a spaces in their names. The cd command says no such file or directory.

Is there any way to do it or should I rename all files with spaces?

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2 Answers

To access a directory having space in between the name use \<space> to access it. You can also use Tab button to auto completion of name.

For example :

guru@guru-Aspire-5738:~$ cd /media/Data/My\ Data/ guru@guru-Aspire-5738:/media/Data/My Data$.
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To to use files with spaces you can either use the escape character or youse the double quotes.

example:

cd new\ dir/

\ is called escape character, used to not expansion of space, so now bash read the space as part of file name.

Or you can use:

cd "new dir"

Now to rename files, it's so easy to rename all files with spaces and replace space with underscore:

for file in * ; do mv "$f" "${f// /_}" ; done

look at answer here there is a script to rename all files and dirs recursively.

The script is:(All rights go to its owner)

#!/bin/bash # set -o xtrace # uncomment for debugging declare weirdchars=" &\'" function normalise_and_rename() { declare -a list=("${!1}") for fileordir in "${list[@]}"; do newname="${fileordir//[${weirdchars}]/_}" [[ ! -a "$newname" ]] && \ mv "$fileordir" "$newname" || \ echo "Skipping existing file, $newname." done } declare -a dirs files while IFS= read -r -d '' dir; do dirs+=("$dir") done < <(find -type d -print0 | sort -z) normalise_and_rename dirs[@] while IFS= read -r -d '' file; do files+=("$file") done < <(find -type f -print0 | sort -z) normalise_and_rename files[@]