this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2023
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 10 months ago (9 children)

The quotes are there because there's spaces in the file name. You don't see them in the GUI because they're not actually there. They're added by the 'ls' command to help with copy/pasting of file names. You can add 'export QUOTING_STYLE=literal' to your ~/.bashrc to permanently suppress them, or just do 'ls -N' as a one off.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 10 months ago

Add-on: you really don't need to get rid of the quotes. It's a very reasonable behavior. You just need to learn/understand what they mean.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

The backslash escapes the space because it would otherwise denote a seperator to the next argument of the command. ls a b c means invoke ls with the three arguments a,b, and c. ls 'a b c' or ls a\ b\ c means invoke ls with one argument "a b c". That behavior is universal for pretty much all unix/linux shells (ie bash).

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Thanks for explaining. How do I go about editing the bashrc file to add the export line? I am still relatively new to linux and the file has a warning about making changes unless I know what I'm doing.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Just paste it into the end of the file, save and close it, then run "source ~/.bashrc" in the terminal to force bash to read the new settings (or close the terminal and open it again).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Heed the warning ;-)

Jk. It's not black magic. Just do as AlpacaChariot said. You might want to read up on it a bit https://www.shell-tips.com/bash/environment-variables/

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I am impressed nobody called OP a noob and told him to "RTFM". Good job y'all! Keep being a positive force.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

Somewhat surprisingly the fediverse has been much kinder for Linux learners than my experience everywhere else online the last decade :)

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