Bash script to cd to directory with spaces in pathname

Question

I m using Bash on macOS X and I d like to create a simple executable script file that would change to another directory when it s run   However  the path to that directory has spaces in it   How the heck do you do this   This is what I have     Name of file  cdcode  File contents   cd   My Code   Now granted  this isn t a long pathname  but my actual pathname is five directories deep and four of those directories have spaces in the path   BTW  I ve tried cd    My Code  and cd    My  Code  and neither of these worked

User · Answer

I found the solution below on this page     x  test  me    eval cd  x   A combination of   in a double-quoted text constant and an eval before cd makes it work like a charm

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cd   My  Code   seems to work for me    If dropping the quotes but keeping the slash doesn t work  can you post some sample code

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You can use any of   cd    My Code  cd   M y Code  cd   My  Code    You cannot use   cd    My Code    The first works because the shell expands    into  HOME   and then tacks on My Code without the double quotes   The second fails because there isn t a user called      double quote  for    to map to

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This will do it  cd   My  Code  I ve had to use that to work with files stored in the iCloud Drive  You won t want to use double quotes   quot   as then it must be an absolute path  In other words  you can t combine double quotes with tilde      By way of example I had to use this for a recent project  cd   Library Mobile  Documents com apple CloudDocs Documents Documents  -  My  iMac Project  I hope that helps

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Avoid   in scripts  use  HOME instead

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After struggling with the same problem  I tried two different solutions that works   1  Use double quotes      with your variables   Easiest way just double quotes your variables as pointed in previous answer   cd   yourPathWithBlankSpace    2  Make use of eval   According to this answer Unix command to escape spaces you can strip blank space then make use of eval  like this   yourPathEscaped   printf  q   yourPathWithBlankSpace   eval cd  yourPathEscaped

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When you double-quote a path  you re stopping the tilde expansion  So there are a few ways to do this   cd    My Code  cd    My Code    The tilde is not quoted here  so tilde expansion will still be run   cd   HOME My Code    You can expand environment variables inside double-quoted strings  this is basically what the tilde expansion is doing  cd   My  Code   You can also escape special characters  such as space  with a backslash

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Use single quotes  like   myPath    my dir   cd  myPath

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When working under Linux the syntax below is right   cd   My  Code  However when you re executing your file  use the syntax below       cdcode   just     and not

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I had a similar problem now were I was using a bash script to dump some data  I ended up creating a symbolic link in the script folder with out any spaces in it  I then pointed my script to the symbolic link and that works fine   To create your link  ln -s  TARGET DIRECTORY OR FILE     SHORTCUT   Mau or may not be of use

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A single backslash works for me   ry4an ry4an-mini    mkdir  My Code   ry4an ry4an-mini    vi todir sh  ry4an ry4an-mini      todir sh   ry4an ry4an-mini My Code  cat    todir sh     bin sh cd   My  Code   Are you sure the problem isn t that your shell script is changing directory in its subshell  but then you re back in the main shell  and original dir  when done   I avoided that by using   to run the script in the current shell  though most folks would just use an alias for this   The spaces could be a red herring

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use double quotes   go            cd

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The very simple way of doing this is-        cd My  Folder   In bash  run DIR command and in the results you would see that the folder or path names having space between them has been written in the results like this -    dir My  Folder New  Folder

[bash] Bash script to cd to directory with spaces in pathname

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