this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2023
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Single quotation marks suddenly appear around file and directory names (discuss.tchncs.de)
submitted 1 year 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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[–] _cnt0@lemmy.villa-straylight.social 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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 1 year 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?