[unix] how does unix handle full path name with space and arguments?

How does unix handle full path name with space and arguments ?
In windows we quote the path and add the command-line arguments after, how is it in unix?

 "c:\foo folder with space\foo.exe" -help

update:

I meant how do I recognize a path from the command line arguments.

If the normal ways don't work, trying substituting spaces with %20.

This worked for me when dealing with SSH and other domain-style commands like auto_smb.

Since spaces are used to separate command line arguments, they have to be escaped from the shell. This can be done with either a backslash () or quotes:

"/path/with/spaces in it/to/a/file"
somecommand -spaced\ option
somecommand "-spaced option"
somecommand '-spaced option'

This is assuming you're running from a shell. If you're writing code, you can usually pass the arguments directly, avoiding the problem:

Example in perl. Instead of doing:

print("code sample");system("somecommand -spaced option");

you can do

print("code sample");system("somecommand", "-spaced option");

Since when you pass the system() call a list, it doesn't break arguments on spaces like it does with a single argument call.

You can quote if you like, or you can escape the spaces with a preceding \, but most UNIX paths (Mac OS X aside) don't have spaces in them.

/Applications/Image\ Capture.app/Contents/MacOS/Image\ Capture

"/Applications/Image Capture.app/Contents/MacOS/Image Capture"

/Applications/"Image Capture.app"/Contents/MacOS/"Image Capture"

All refer to the same executable under Mac OS X.

I'm not sure what you mean about recognizing a path - if any of the above paths are passed as a parameter to a program the shell will put the entire string in one variable - you don't have to parse multiple arguments to get the entire path.

Also be careful with double-quotes -- on the Unix shell this expands variables. Some are obvious (like $foo and \t) but some are not (like !foo).

For safety, use single-quotes!

You can either quote it like your Windows example above, or escape the spaces with backslashes:

 "/foo folder with space/foo" --help
 /foo\ folder\ with\ space/foo --help

I would also like to point out that in case you are using command line arguments as part of a shell script (.sh file), then within the script, you would need to enclose the argument in quotes. So if your command looks like

>scriptName.sh arg1 arg2

And arg1 is your path that has spaces, then within the shell script, you would need to refer to it as "$arg1" instead of $arg1

Here are the details

You can quote the entire path as in windows or you can escape the spaces like in:

/foo\ folder\ with\ space/foo.sh -help

Both ways will work!