Single quotation marks suddenly appear around file and directory names (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 11 months ago by StrobeSpirits@discuss.tchncs.de to c/linux@lemmy.ml

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I installed some software and I think afterwards I was navigating through CLI and noticed that some directories or some files in some directories had single quotation marks around the names. They don't appear in the GUI. How do I get rid of them? Do I have to use a recursive command to delete the quotation marks for the entire file system?

I've actually had this problem a few times in the past but cannot recall why they happen nor what the solution was.

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[-] MorphiusFaydal@lemmy.world 63 points 11 months ago

The quotes are there because there's spaces in the file name. You don't see them in the GUI because they're not actually there. They're added by the 'ls' command to help with copy/pasting of file names. You can add 'export QUOTING_STYLE=literal' to your ~/.bashrc to permanently suppress them, or just do 'ls -N' as a one off.

[-] StrobeSpirits@discuss.tchncs.de 8 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Thanks. The export command got rid of the quotation marks but I still have an issue where when I cd into one of the directories that had quotation marks (a directory with two words in the name) there is a backslash after the first word and a forward slash at the end of the file name when I use tab to complete the rest of the file name.

[-] _cnt0@lemmy.villa-straylight.social 47 points 11 months ago

Add-on: you really don't need to get rid of the quotes. It's a very reasonable behavior. You just need to learn/understand what they mean.

[-] _cnt0@lemmy.villa-straylight.social 30 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

The backslash escapes the space because it would otherwise denote a seperator to the next argument of the command. ls a b c means invoke ls with the three arguments a,b, and c. ls 'a b c' or ls a\ b\ c means invoke ls with one argument "a b c". That behavior is universal for pretty much all unix/linux shells (ie bash).

[-] StrobeSpirits@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 11 months ago

Thanks for explaining. How do I go about editing the bashrc file to add the export line? I am still relatively new to linux and the file has a warning about making changes unless I know what I'm doing.

[-] AlpacaChariot@lemmy.world 4 points 11 months ago

Just paste it into the end of the file, save and close it, then run "source ~/.bashrc" in the terminal to force bash to read the new settings (or close the terminal and open it again).

[-] _cnt0@lemmy.villa-straylight.social 4 points 11 months ago

Heed the warning ;-)

Jk. It's not black magic. Just do as AlpacaChariot said. You might want to read up on it a bit https://www.shell-tips.com/bash/environment-variables/

[-] phx@lemmy.ca 13 points 11 months ago

That's to escape the space, so that it doesn't register as a separate keyword in whatever command you're running.

For paths/filenames with spaces, you must escape all spaces with the backslash, or use single/double quotes around it. Single quotes also prevent stuff like interpreting $ etc etc as a reference to a variable

[-] Falmarri@lemmy.world 12 points 11 months ago

The backslash is escaping the space, and the forward slash is just how tab complete works, because it's a directory, and you might be wanting to add more to go further down the directory tree

[-] elouboub@kbin.social 15 points 11 months ago

I am impressed nobody called OP a noob and told him to "RTFM". Good job y'all! Keep being a positive force.

[-] wolfshadowheart@kbin.social 11 points 11 months ago

Somewhat surprisingly the fediverse has been much kinder for Linux learners than my experience everywhere else online the last decade :)

[-] BCsven@lemmy.ca 8 points 11 months ago

That is normal with tab completion, since spaces will be seen as other commands so the slash escapes the space character

[-] squaresinger@feddit.de 19 points 11 months ago

I understand why this is weird to you, but it's supposed to work like that and you should really keep it that way.

Otherwise you have no way of knowing whether your directory contains a file called "a b c", or three files called "a" "b" and "c" (all without the quotation marks obviously).

In Linux a blank space denotes a seperator. So basically, a space means "A new thing begins now".

So e.g. if you use the cat command to print the contents of a file called "a b c", and you do it like so: "cat a b c", it will try to print the contents of the three files called "a" "b" and "c".

The other way you can go is to escape the space character. Escaping tells a program that the following character has no special meaning and is used only in it's meaning as pure text. In Linux you escape using this character: .

So "a b c" is equivalent to a\ b\ c.

All in all, this is a weird thing to get used to as a beginner, but it's an important and even helpful thing.

All in all, there are some things that are pretty weird when you first switch to Linux, but most of them have a reason. You can bend Linux to do whatever you want and you can even make it very Windows-y if you want. But in many cases there are reasons behind design decisions and bending them often results in issues down the road.

But in the end, it's your PC, and it's Linux, so do what you want.

[-] flontlocs@lemmy.world 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Command line in general, not just Linux.

Forgetting to quoteblock spaces in Windows won't be pleasant either (especially when Windows has a Sydtem directory called "Program Files".

[-] _cnt0@lemmy.villa-straylight.social 19 points 11 months ago

I'd wager a guess, that all file/folder paths that are surrounded by quotes contain at least one space!? And you're talking about the output of ls? It's rather unlikely, that installing any software has changed that behavior. It's just a display feature, to denote that "two" parts separated by a space are actually one.

[-] ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org 2 points 11 months ago

And also I think those paths are properly escaped, so you can just copy them to the terminal with the quotes for use as a path.

But I may be misremembering it so I would be happy if someone could confirm this.

[-] I_Am_Jacks_____@lemmings.world 4 points 11 months ago

You could either alias ls='ls -N' or do something like export QUOTING_STYLE=literal

[+] Shdwdrgn@mander.xyz -6 points 11 months ago

If you are referring to seeing filenames with spaces wrapped in single quotes when you do an "ls" then refer to this stackexchange answer for a discussion on the long history of why everyone considers this a major bug but the maintainers refuse to fix it. The short answer is to do "ls -N" to correct this problem, and you will probably want to create an alias to do this automatically for you.

[-] _cnt0@lemmy.villa-straylight.social 15 points 11 months ago

It's really neither a bug nor a problem. It is very reasonable default behavior to enable piping to or parsing by other commands because space is the default separator for arguments.

[-] Shdwdrgn@mander.xyz -4 points 11 months ago

So you're saying you do not already take the reasonable approach of quoting filenames in your scripts, and the rest of us have to work around your lack of foresight?

[-] _cnt0@lemmy.villa-straylight.social 9 points 11 months ago

Feel free to travel back in time and have a discussion with Ken Thompson in ~1970, whether spaces in file/folder names should be allowed in the first place. I for one use an underscore instead, whenever I have control.

[-] Shdwdrgn@mander.xyz 1 points 11 months ago

Yeah I try to avoid them as well, but sometimes you have filesystems shared by Windows users who don't know any better. I also process tv show and movie files which always contains spaces in their names, so I just got in the habit of quoting the filenames so there's never any question. One of these days I need to see if those single quotes interfere with the process of renaming files -- do they get pulled in when you read a directory into an array? If so, then when I work with the filenames as strings it would mean that the new filename is incorrect. If they don't get included, then the whole argument of it making it 'easier' to work from the command line is false because now you have inconsistent results depending on how exactly you work with the results from the ls command. As it is, I'll probably have to start including the -N parameter in my scripts just to make sure I always get a known result now and in the future.

[-] _cnt0@lemmy.villa-straylight.social 3 points 11 months ago

It's certainly no bad habit to handle spaces in scripts preemptively, and obviously they do occur in the wild. Quotes from ls output do not get piped to other commands. I had to look that up myself right now, because it has been quite a while since it mattered to me.

$ touch 'file with spaces in name'
$ ls
'file with spaces in name'
$ ls | cat
file with spaces in name
$

Looking through some scripts I wrote back in the day, I seem to like to use ls -1 in scripts. I guess that reduces ambiguity on what the separator is.

[-] Shdwdrgn@mander.xyz 1 points 11 months ago

Using ls -1 certainly helps if you are stripping content from the screen, but in recent years I have always found that using ls within a bash script (like if you use FILES=$((ls)) to get an array) returns a proper list correctly separated. It would not surprise me though if that is a feature of bash 4, I do remember we used to have to use the read command to get the appropriate output. So yeah, if all bash commands were simultaneously updated to strip those single quotes at the same time that it was added to the output of ls then it's probably not an issue. I still find it a completely useless annoyance just seeing them in the output and having to add flags to all of my desktops and servers to strip out content that I never asked for. If somebody wanted this then why not let them add a flag to their machines to include the feature?

[-] baggins@lemmy.ca 9 points 11 months ago

It's definitely not a bug 😆

[-] Gobbel2000@feddit.de 3 points 11 months ago

My experience is you should try to always use find over ls when writing robust scripts, and consider ls as just an end user tool, not a scripting tool.

this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2023

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