I installed some software and I think afterwards I was navigating through CLI and noticed that some directories or some files in some directories had single quotation marks around the names. They don’t appear in the GUI. How do I get rid of them? Do I have to use a recursive command to delete the quotation marks for the entire file system?
I’ve actually had this problem a few times in the past but cannot recall why they happen nor what the solution was.
Thanks. The export command got rid of the quotation marks but I still have an issue where when I cd into one of the directories that had quotation marks (a directory with two words in the name) there is a backslash after the first word and a forward slash at the end of the file name when I use tab to complete the rest of the file name.
That’s to escape the space, so that it doesn’t register as a separate keyword in whatever command you’re running.
For paths/filenames with spaces, you must escape all spaces with the backslash, or use single/double quotes around it. Single quotes also prevent stuff like interpreting $ etc etc as a reference to a variable
The backslash is escaping the space, and the forward slash is just how tab complete works, because it’s a directory, and you might be wanting to add more to go further down the directory tree
I am impressed nobody called OP a noob and told him to “RTFM”. Good job y’all! Keep being a positive force.
Somewhat surprisingly the fediverse has been much kinder for Linux learners than my experience everywhere else online the last decade :)
That is normal with tab completion, since spaces will be seen as other commands so the slash escapes the space character