Windows Command Line – How to Open Files with Spaces in Names

command linefilenamespathwhitespacewindows

I'm trying to use the start command in the command prompt to open files and folders, but I'm unable to open files and folders that contain space(s) in their name.

I have tried the following queries (testing on C:\Program Files):

start C:\Program Files
start C:/Program\ Files
start C:/"Program Files"
start C:\"Program Files"
start "C:\Program Files"
start "C:/Program Files"
start C:/Program_Files
start C:/Program%20Files

But none of them work.

Best Answer

You would use:

start "" "c:\program files\"

That is because the first parameter is used as the title of the window, and is oddly enough, enclosed in double quotes.

Edit:

Here is a source about it: SS64

As an example, if you just type start "title" it opens a new cmd window with the title "title" in the title bar.

Related Solutions

Linux – How to pass a file or folder containing whitespace as an argument to a command-line program in a GNU/Linux or Cygwin environment

You would be better off using the -exec action (option) of find and quoting your arguments.

Example:

find . -type f -exec grep stuff '{}' \;

The quotes will keep the spaces from being interpreted and you don't have to pipe everything through xargs unnecessarily.

From the find man page:

-exec command ;
Execute command; true if 0 status is returned. All following arguments to find are taken to be arguments to the command until an argument consisting of ‘;’ is encountered. The string ‘{}’ is replaced by the current file name being processed everywhere it occurs in the arguments to the command, not just in arguments where it is alone, as in some versions of find. Both of these constructions might need to be escaped (with a ‘\’) or quoted to protect them from expansion by the shell. See the EXAMPLES section for examples of the use of the -exec option. The specified command is run once for each matched file. The command is executed in the starting directory.

There are unavoidable security problems surrounding use of the -exec action; you should use the -execdir option instead.

Winrar command line zip folder

If the folder contains no files apart from subfolder containing files there is an error

Use the -r recurse subfolders switch.

Examples to compress a folder

rar a -r yourfiles.rar *.txt c:\yourfolder
creates archive yourfiles.rar and compresses all .txt files in c:\yourfolder and all its subfolders
rar a yourfiles 
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a command adds to the archive

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Source Using the WinRAR Command-line tools in Windows