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.

I understand why this is weird to you, but it's supposed to work like that and you should really keep it that way.

Otherwise you have no way of knowing whether your directory contains a file called "a b c", or three files called "a" "b" and "c" (all without the quotation marks obviously).

In Linux a blank space denotes a seperator. So basically, a space means "A new thing begins now".

So e.g. if you use the cat command to print the contents of a file called "a b c", and you do it like so: "cat a b c", it will try to print the contents of the three files called "a" "b" and "c".

The other way you can go is to escape the space character. Escaping tells a program that the following character has no special meaning and is used only in it's meaning as pure text. In Linux you escape using this character: .

So "a b c" is equivalent to a\ b\ c.

All in all, this is a weird thing to get used to as a beginner, but it's an important and even helpful thing.

All in all, there are some things that are pretty weird when you first switch to Linux, but most of them have a reason. You can bend Linux to do whatever you want and you can even make it very Windows-y if you want. But in many cases there are reasons behind design decisions and bending them often results in issues down the road.

But in the end, it's your PC, and it's Linux, so do what you want.

I'd wager a guess, that all file/folder paths that are surrounded by quotes contain at least one space!? And you're talking about the output of ls? It's rather unlikely, that installing any software has changed that behavior. It's just a display feature, to denote that "two" parts separated by a space are actually one.

You could either alias ls='ls -N' or do something like export QUOTING_STYLE=literal

If you are referring to seeing filenames with spaces wrapped in single quotes when you do an "ls" then refer to this stackexchange answer for a discussion on the long history of why everyone considers this a major bug but the maintainers refuse to fix it. The short answer is to do "ls -N" to correct this problem, and you will probably want to create an alias to do this automatically for you.