I installed some software and I think afterwards I was navigating through CLI and noticed that some directories or some files in some directories had single quotation marks around the names. They don’t appear in the GUI. How do I get rid of them? Do I have to use a recursive command to delete the quotation marks for the entire file system?
I’ve actually had this problem a few times in the past but cannot recall why they happen nor what the solution was.
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.
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
That is normal with tab completion, since spaces will be seen as other commands so the slash escapes the space character
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.