Copying files from directories having spaces in its name

Question

This is what I tried.

inputFile=$(zenity --file-selection --title "Test" --text "Please select the file for analysis." | sed -e "s/ /\\\ /g")

I did the sed operation to replace white spaces with a \ and a whitespace to make the copying command to work. Then from the Zenity file selection GUI I have chosen a file so that the value inside inputFile is /home/username/Documents/Learning\ and\ Development/testfile.txt.

Now when I try to copy this file to my working directory with

cp $inputFile .

Still it returns the error,

cp: cannot stat ‘/home/user/Documents/Learning\\’: No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat ‘and\\’: No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat ‘Development/WhatsApp.apk’: No such file or directory

Is there any way to bypass this? Actually I am writing a program. So I don't want to tell the users to rename their folder names to avoid spaces.

Solution 1

Easily you can do the trick, enclose by double quotes:

cp "$inputFile" /destination/

Enclosing characters in double quotes (‘"’) preserves the literal value of all characters within the quotes, with the exception of ‘$’, ‘`’, ‘\’, Read more: http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Double-Quotes.html

Solution 2

you can add * where the space appeared and the copy can be done like

 cp  /home/user/users*tst.txt  /home/user/Downloads

where you want to copy users tst.txt to Downloads folder from home folder

Comments

[Jos]

How about cp "$inputFile" .?

[Anonymous Platypus]

Omg! It worked. I burned hell lot of time on this. My bad :( By the way, I had to remove the sed operation I did in order to work this :)

[Dark Prince]

instead of * you can use ? too

[Doogle]

Works like a charm just add a " to encapsulate the path. thanks for sharing