Windows/Cygwin directory name stuff

Andre Oliveira da Costa costa@cade.com.br
Thu Dec 16 09:25:00 GMT 1999


> -----Original Message-----
> From: cygwin-owner@sourceware.cygnus.com
> [ mailto:cygwin-owner@sourceware.cygnus.com]On Behalf Of Paul Bailey
> Sent: Thursday, December 16, 1999 3:01 PM
>
[...]
> Is there some mechanism to navigate in bash through a filesystem where
> directories have spaces in their names?  (I mean, I know Unix
> sees separate
> words after a command as an argument list, but that doesn't apply in the
> case of "cd" since I don't think you can cd into two separate directories
> simultaneously, in the same shell, at the same time.)

You see, the shell does exactly what it should do: interpret the command
line, dealing with wildcards and separating arguments to commands. If a
particular command cannot handle multiple arguments (e.g. 'cd'), it's not
the shell's business. If there's an error with the parsing of the command
line, the shell complains; if not, it's the command that complains.

As for the filenames with spaces on it, you can have them on UNIX (and,
therefore, cygwin) too; you just have to tell the shell not to interpret
them, so that they are treated literally as part of the arguments. You do
this by prefixing them with a backslash ('\') or by putting quotes (single
or double) around the names of which they are part of. BTW: this is valid
for other special chars as well (*, [, ], {, } etc.).

HTH,

Andre
--
André Oliveira da Costa
(costa@cade.com.br)


--
Want to unsubscribe from this list?
Send a message to cygwin-unsubscribe@sourceware.cygnus.com



More information about the Cygwin mailing list