How do I pass this path to a bash function?

Question

I've been having trouble moving to directories with spaces in the name, but it I just figured it was a problem with Cygwin and worked around it.

Then I found that I could create symbolic links to those directories which made me maybe think it wasn't Cygwin. Then I remembered I created an alias for cd that would list the directory contents and saw this:

cdls { cd $1; ls; }
alias cd='cdls'

So the problem is when I try this it fails:

$ cd /cygdrive/c/Program\ Files/
bash: cd: /cygdrive/c/Program: No such file or directory

I can see that the space is causing the path to be split into multiple arguments, but how do I join them together again?

Answer 1

Quote it:

cdls { cd "$1"; ls; }

Quoting in bash can get hairy, since there's multiple levels of interpretation, but it's usually just a matter of playing with it a bit.

Answer 2

Try:

cdls() { cd "$1"; ls; }

Answer 3

Looks like I just needed to explain the problem for the answer to come to me. My solution is:

cdls () { cd "$*"; ls ; }
alias cd='cdls'

Simple.