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Single quotation marks suddenly appear around file and directory names
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this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2023
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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.
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.
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.
The backslash escapes the space because it would otherwise denote a seperator to the next argument of the command.
ls a b cmeans invoke ls with the three arguments a,b, and c.ls 'a b c'orls a\ b\ cmeans invoke ls with one argument "a b c". That behavior is universal for pretty much all unix/linux shells (ie bash).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.
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/
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).
That's to escape the space, so that it doesn't register as a separate keyword in whatever command you're running.
For paths/filenames with spaces, you must escape all spaces with the backslash, or use single/double quotes around it. Single quotes also prevent stuff like interpreting $ etc etc as a reference to a variable
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
That is normal with tab completion, since spaces will be seen as other commands so the slash escapes the space character