cant copy filename over

[S.D.Willie]

simple question i feel i should know. i have a few music videos i want to copy over from my secondary drive. i can mount the drive, see what i need, but in this case one particular file is named " Saving Private Ryan.mpeg" w/out the quotes. notice the spaces in between the 3 words.

if i try to copy it with the command line i think since there are no spaces in the name i keep getting a syntax error about not being able to find it. i also cant rename it as well. i tried underscores too. any idea? tia

[CMonster]

for file by file you can add a \ just before the space, see the following example:

This will not work:

$cp /mnt/windows/My Documents/A MOST INCREDIBLE CHAIN OF EVENTS.doc ~/

This will work:

$cp /mnt/windows/My\ Documents/A\ MOST\ INCREDIBLE\ CHAIN\ OF\ EVENTS.doc ~/

Now if you wanted to do the whole My Documents directory this comamnd will work and get all the subdirectories and files that have spaces in the names:


cp -ax /mnt/windows/My\ Documents ~/

\ tells the shell to recognize the following special character -in this case a space

~/ is an abreviation for your home directory, in this case it will put the copied files in ~/ (your home dir)



I'm sure there is an edit for the bash profile or something that can handle spaces automatically because I do not see this problem with all my Linux installs, but I am too lazy to research it just now ... I got turkey to smoke

[S.D.Willie]

wow, thats tricky and took me a few times to get right. i was getting the stuff from my secondary linux drive with a hosed version of drake.

cp /mnt/hdb6/br/videos/Saving\ Private\ Ryan.mpeg /home/br/Documents

did the trick. now i see i need to hit the man pages of chmod and what not. thanks CMonster.

btw, have fun smoking your turkey. i hope you have those special extra big rolling papers.

[CMonster]

i hope you have those special extra big rolling papers.

Hahahahahahahha!