Ubuntu – How to navigate to folders with spaces in their names? I get “no such file or directory” when I try

command line

I'm completely new and lost in Ubuntu 12.04, I'm having trouble navigating to my Sublime folder which I know is in my /opt folder. Yet I've tried to no avail to navigate into it via Terminal window. The directory is colored in blue, no idea what this means…but I am able to access the folder using the GUI explorer…?

k@k-Ubuntu:~$ cd /opt
k@k-Ubuntu:/opt$ ls
Sublime Text 2
k@k-Ubuntu:/opt$ cd Sublime Text 2
bash: cd: Sublime: No such file or directory
k@k-Ubuntu:/opt$ cd /Sublime Text 2
bash: cd: /Sublime: No such file or directory

Best Answer

Go inside the /opt directory via terminal and then run below command,

k@k-Ubuntu:~$ cd /opt
k@k-Ubuntu:/opt$ cd "Sublime Text 2"

As the folder you want to connect has spaces in the name, you must surround the name with quotes in order for the Shell to read it correctly (as one name). In other case it will read only the Sublime and this doesn’t exist.

Another way to avoid this issue, is to use Tab Completion. This is a feature that will help you to auto-fill weird names and/or long names. Read here about Tab Completion and learn it. It is very useful(in Ubuntu is pre-installed).

A third way for names with spaces is the backslash \ . Above command with quotes could be

cd Sublime\ Text\ 2/

the backslash followed by a space explicitly denotes a space.

A suggestion could be: Do not create folders in Linux with space in name. Prefer something like Sublime-Text-2 or Sublime_Text_2

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Ubuntu – How to easily create a GUI dialog with a bash script

Here's a very minimal implementation in Yad.

A textfile named 'mylist' in the same directory as the script contains "1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10". A space character is the default delimeter for input into lists.

The example script is:

#/bin/bash
thelist=$(<mylist)
thechoice=$(yad --title="Choose a value" --width=200 --height=200 --list --column="Values" --separator="" $thelist)
exit $(yad --title="You chose..." --text=$thechoice)

That's it. Scrolling the list is handled automatically. The --separator="" is to supress Yad's default of appending a pipe character ("|") to the output.

When you read the man page, you will see that you have a large array of possibilites. You can add buttons, icons, radio buttons, etc. You can create tabbed dialogs by using Yad's Notebook feature to embed dialogs within other dialogs as plugins.

There's a long example at PCLinusOS mag and some interesting shorter examples at the Yad site.

Ubuntu – “sudo mv /fromdir /todir” – not recognizing the fromdir location

In your mv command you are using a relative path for opt/shiny-server/ so this will only work if you current directory has opt as a subdirectory. To ensure that this isn't the issue use a full path /opt/shiny-server/.

To change permission of /opt/shiny-server/test/ use sudo chmod 777 /opt/shiny-server/test This opens up the permissions for everyone.

A better solution is to change the permission to give You more access sudo chown <username>:<username> /opt/shiny-server/test/

To work with files with strange characters in the name, wrap the filename in quotes, and escape single and double quote within the name "this<>isn\'t aNICE file.name"

Best Answer

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