Thanks to help from linuxquestions, I can back up this laptop to another laptop using rsync. Works great and extremely quickly!

You probably know that old TV series 24. America is just full of bad guys, and they all want to get Jack Bauer! It's rubbish I know, but it relaxes me in the evening.

Yesterday, I wanted to copy a directory 24 Season6 from a usb to my old laptop. Thought I would use rsync, as I am very impressed with that program!

But I kept getting errors. I think it is because of the space in the directory name.

The usb is at /media/pedro/X3

I tried:

but I kept getting a 'can't stat' error 'no such file or directory'

Is it the space causing the error?

you need to mark the space so bash knows it is there. In Linux, most Unix, that is done with the backslash \
So "24 Season6" on the command line is "24\ Season6"

1 members found this post helpful.

In addition to backslashes, you can also wrap the whole name in quotes. (Useful if a path would have lots of spaces.)

Also, for local paths you can use tab-completion - try typing...
...and (depending on which other files/dirs exist), you may get the whole path with half as many key presses.

1 members found this post helpful.

Yes. And they better be single quotes. Because $foo inside double quotes will get interpreted as variable with name foo by shell.