how does unix handle full path name with space and arguments ?

Question

how does unix handle full path name with space and arguments ? in windows we quote the path and add the commandline arguments after, how is it in unix ?

"c:\foo folder with space\foo.exe" -help

update: i meant how do i recognise a path from the command line arguments.

Answer 1

You can quote if you like, or you can escape the spaces with a preceding \, but most UNIX paths (Mac OS X aside) don't have spaces in them.

/Applications/Image\ Capture.app/Contents/MacOS/Image\ Capture

"/Applications/Image Capture.app/Contents/MacOS/Image Capture"

/Applications/"Image Capture.app"/Contents/MacOS/"Image Capture"

All refer to the same executable under Mac OS X.

I'm not sure what you mean about recognizing a path - if any of the above paths are passed as a parameter to a program the shell will put the entire string in one variable - you don't have to parse multiple arguments to get the entire path.

Answer 2

You can quote the entire path as in windows or you can escape the spaces like in:

/foo\ folder\ with\ space/foo.sh -help

Both ways will work!

Answer 3

You can either quote it like Windows, or escape the slashes with backslashes:

 "/foo folder with space/foo" --help
 /foo\ folder\ with\ space/foo --help

Answer 4

Since spaces are used to separate command line arguments, they have to be escaped from the shell. This can be done with either a backslash () or quotes:

"/path/with/spaces in it/to/a/file"
somecommand -spaced\ option
somecommand "-spaced option"
somecommand '-spaced option'

This is assuming you're running from a shell. If you're writing code, you can usually pass the arguments directly, avoiding the problem:

Example in perl. Instead of doing:

print("code sample");system("somecommand -spaced option");

you can do

print("code sample");system("somecommand", "-spaced option");

Since when you pass the system() call a list, it doesn't break arguments on spaces like it does with a single argument call.

Answer 5

Also be careful with double-quotes -- on the Unix shell this expands variables. Some are obvious (like $foo and \t) but some are not (like !foo).

For safety, use single-quotes!