Mac OS X for Unix Geeks

Working with File and Directory Names

Traditionally, Unix users tend to avoid spaces in file and directory names, sometimes inserting hyphens and underscores where spaces are implied, as follows:

textFile.txt
text-file.txt
text_file.txt

However, most Mac users tend to insert spaces into their file and directory names, and in a lot of cases, these names tend to be long and descriptive. While this practice is okay if you’re going to work in the GUI all the time, it creates a small hurdle to jump over when you’re working on the command line. To get around these spaces, you have two choices: escape them, or quote the file or directory name.

To escape a space on the command line, simply insert a backslash (\) before the space or any other special characters, such as a parenthesis. Because they have meaning to the shell, special characters that must be escaped are: * # ` " ' \ $ | & ? ; ~ ( ) < >! ^. Here is an example of how to use a backslash to escape a space character in a file or directory name:

cd ~/Documents/Editorial\ Reports

Or you can use quotation marks around the file or directory name that contains the space, as follows:

cd ~/Documents/"Editorial Reports"

There is one other way to get around this problem, but it involves using the Finder in combination with the Terminal application. To launch a Classic application such as Word 2001, which probably lives on the Mac OS 9 partition of your hard drive, you could enter the path as follows, using escape characters:

open -a /Volumes/Mac\ ...