MacOS – Is it possible to have bash escape spaces in pwd

bashitermmacos

I'd like to copy the current directory to the clipboard, something like: pwd | pbcopy. However, pwd does not escape the space, so something in "Application Support", for example, doesn't copy correctly. I don't seem to remember this always being the case, so I could have boffed something. Using iTerm2.

Is there bash setting to escape everything? having trouble searching, too many questions/topics about Spaces.app or esc.

Current:

$ pwd
/Library/Application Support/Google Earth/

Preferred:

$ pwd
/Library/Application\ Support/Google\ Earth/

Already seen posts: Copying the current directory's path to the clipboard and How to cd to a directory with a name containing spaces in bash?, which do not address this. I would have made a comment in the former, but I don't have the privileges.

Best Answer

This command will escape spaces properly:

printf "%q\n" "$(pwd)" | pbcopy

You can alias it using something with history like cwd if you don't mind re-defining a different cwd

alias cwd='printf "%q\n" "$(pwd)" | pbcopy'

Ditch the pipe to pbcopy if you want it to work more like pwd and just print out the escaped path.

Or, to print the pwd while also copying it to the clipboard, use tee and an output process substitution:

alias cwd='printf "%q\n" "$(pwd)" | tee >(pbcopy)'

Related Solutions

MacOS – How to make terminal sessions resume on Lion with iterm2 and tcshrc

You could add something like this to the startup script of your default shell (mine is zsh, most people use bash, I guess, so you may have to tweak.)

Here's my bit of screen jiggery-pokery (in my .zshrc)

# Autoload screen if we aren't in it.  (Thanks Fjord!)
if [[ $STY = '' ]] then screen -xRR; fi

I got this from somewhere on the interwebs (I don't recall where, and I don't know who Fjord is, but good on him.

With this you can close your iTerm window, and it will resume where you left off when you reopen it. I highly recommend reading the screen man page also.

MacOS – How to make OS X’s bash expand $PWD to be case sensitive

You have two choices really: convert $PWD to a consistent case before comparing to your other string (which should also have consistent case). Or drop case-sensitive comparisons.

Converting it to lower case before comparing:

#!/bin/bash
if [ `echo $PWD | tr [:upper:] [:lower:]` != /users/myuser/documents/backup ]
then
    echo "Wrong path: $PWD"
    exit 0
fi

Dropping case sensitive comparisons:

#!/bin/bash
shopt -s nocasematch
if [[ "$PWD" != /Users/myuser/Documents/Backup ]]
then
    echo "Wrong path: $PWD"
    exit 0
fi

Best Answer

Related Solutions

MacOS – How to make terminal sessions resume on Lion with iterm2 and tcshrc

MacOS – How to make OS X’s bash expand $PWD to be case sensitive

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