Do you abhor spaces in file names as much as I do?

Maybe I'm just a holdout from the old unix days when we used underscores instead of spaces, but I hate spaces in file names.

Simply hate them.

Really bugs me when people send me a file, and the file name has spaces in it.

I also hate capital letters in file names.

:grr:

Who's with me?!

Who peed in your cheerios this morning?




Yes. I am still mad about the grocery cart.

:popcorn:

chill out, homey...
:silly:

difficult. x(

I hate capital letters only on UNIX machines. It doesn't matter to me on Windows machines since they're not case-sensitive.

...I put them in Word and Excel files, but usually not anywhere else. They seem to make a lot of ArcGIS tools crash, so I have a hell of a time trying to convince my students not to use them...

I was glad when we could finally use spaces in file names

Except for music and movies. Then it doesn't bother me.

Hate it, hate it, hate it. I don't know if it really does cause problems, but I FEAR that it does, so I hate it.

Plus it looks stupid.

which is why Windows users (almost) never notice that it's a problem. But if you come across a filename with spaces in when working from a DOS prompt then you have to enclose the whole thing in quotes, like this:

cd "c:\Documents and Settings\rwild"

because otherwise the shell thinks 'and' is the next argument (because spaces separate commands and their arguments).

#!/bin/bash
# blank-rename.sh
#
# Substitutes underscores for blanks in all the filenames in a directory.

ONE=1                           # For getting singular/plural right (see below)
number=0                        # Keeps track of how many files actually renamed.

FOUND=0                         # Successful return value.

for filename in *               # Traverse all files in directory
do
        echo "$filename" | grep -q " "                  #  Check whether filename

        if < $? -eq $FOUND >                            #+ contains space(s).
        then
          fname=$filename                               #  Strip off path.
          n=`echo $fname | sed -e "s/ /_/g"`            #  Substitute underscore for blank.

          mv "$fname" "$n"                              #  Do the actual renaming.

          let "number += 1"
        fi
done

if < "$number" -eq "$ONE" >                             #  For correct grammar.
then
  echo "$number file renamed."
else
  echo "$number files renamed."
fi

exit 0

Edit: did some touchups to the text placement

:D

RL

and you'd be surprised how many times that causes problems on certain operating systems and network servers.

hisssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss

Iamsurwecandowithoutthem.It'showtheyusedtodoitanywaybackinancientdays.Forexampleyoucanprobablyreadwhatiamwritingrightnowright?

They are a pain in the arse when I'm working in the command line! I have to escape the spaces with backslashes, like this:

$ cd /mnt/windows/Documents\ and\ Settings/rwild

I'm always suprised when people put filenames with spaces in them on their websites as well.

Dumbasses.

then I switched to Linux. Everyone who doesn't think it's a big deal, try working with space-having Windows-imported filenames in a Linux terminal for a while and you'll see how annoying it is.

Capital letters aren't too bad, as long as there aren't a whole lot of them.

vacuum