Handling spaces in filenames

Matthias Schniedermeyer ms at citd.de
Wed Aug 12 13:07:58 MDT 2009


On 11.08.2009 21:04, Larry Alkoff wrote:
> Man rsync says that
> "If  you  need  to  transfer  a  filename that contains whitespace,  
> you'll need to either escape the whitespace in a way that the remote  
> shell will understand, or  use  wildcards in place of the spaces.".
>
> I am regularly doing backups with rsync and notice that files names with  
> a space in them copy properly, without any special escape or other  
> characters.
>
> Is this a change in rsync?
> Is the warning in the man page no longer needed?
>
> I will say that my 'filenames' with spaces are mostly (if not all)  
> directory names so perhaps rsync knows to handle directory names better
> than file names.

It only refers to white-spaces directly in the commandline, nothing
else.

You to "protect" things like this:
rsync <whatever> "source dir/" "target dir/" (Local, nothing special)

rsync <whatever> "source dir/" "destination:target\ dir/" (Remote space has to be "protected")

or
rsync <whatever> --protect-args "source dir/" "destination:target dir/"
(Same as before, but rsync does the protecting itself)





Bis denn

-- 
Real Programmers consider "what you see is what you get" to be just as 
bad a concept in Text Editors as it is in women. No, the Real Programmer
wants a "you asked for it, you got it" text editor -- complicated, 
cryptic, powerful, unforgiving, dangerous.



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