Hi everyone,

Now my problem is a bit of an obscure one, but bear with me. I wrote a little program to extract a complete filename from a log file, and now I want to have rm delete that file by entering:

rm `filenamefinder`

Unfortunately, the file path the filenamefinder program provides has a space in it. I made two versions of the finder program with the following outputs, minus quotes:

"/onedirectory/another/Spaced Directory/foo.bar"
"/onedirectory/another/Spaced\ Directory/foo.bar"

The problem is that rm gives the following errors:

[ky@tails ~]$ rm `~/filenamefinder`
rm: cannot remove `/onedirectory/another/Spaced': No such file or directory
rm: cannot remove `Directory/foo.bar': No such file or directory

[ky@tails ~]$ rm `~/filenamefinder2`
rm: cannot remove `/onedirectory/another/Spaced\\': No such file or directory
rm: cannot remove `Directory/foo.bar': No such file or directory

So basically whether I have "Spaced Directory" or "Spaced\ Directory" being output by my program, rm still thinks they are two different names. How can I convince it they're one?

Thanks,
-K.W.

P.S. folder names changed to protect the innocent

Shell expansion of commands allows one to give multiple inputs to a command which are delineated: space, tab, comma, semicolon, etc.

The shell is interpreting the command to rm something as two parameters, because of the space in the path to the file.

Try enclosing the /path/to/file name in double quotes, "/path/to/file name" to prevent shell expansion.

rm `"filenamefinder"`

Well, you lead me to the solution, even if what you told me wasn't exactly it.

rm `"filenamefinder"` didn't work, but rm "`filenamefinder`" did, and only when I used it with the version of the program that _doesn't_ put a backslash before spaces as an escape character.

So, thanks for getting me on the right track and leading me to a solution!

-K.W.