I have built a NAS for my home LAN, and shared parts of it with the rest of my Family. They all run Windows machines, while I run Debian Lenny. When I attempt to access part of the directories where they are asking for assistance, I often encounter files and even directories with spaces in their names. When I attempt to CD into these directories, I receive the message that no such directory exists, because the command doesn't know that the portion of the command following the space is still part of the directory or file name.

Question:
How can I access files and directories from the command line when the names of these files and/or directories have spaces in them?

Thank you in advance for your assistance.

Hi,

By placing the dir and/or file between double quotes: "/dir with spaces/file with spaces".

Or by escaping the spaces: /dir\ with\ spaces/file\ with\ spaces

Hope this helps.

1 members found this post helpful.

Use tab key from keyboard.

1 members found this post helpful.

you need to \ escape the spaces

so something like cd To\ The\ Directory\ with\ Spaces

your shell should be able to tab complete for you so you don't need to manually add them all, just type enough for it to be unique and hit the tab key

1 members found this post helpful.

Thank you for your input. I will try all of the suggestions that you have offered. This will save me a lot of problems.

Thanks Again for everything!

Thank you to everyone who has responded. The information you have provided is both important and timely.


Thank you again everyone!