Remove Spaces from File Names

By  on  

Spaces in file names are a nightmare with the web; you deal with %20 and other nonsense when spaces are in file names.  That's why when I receive images with spaces I cringe;  I mean hell, dealing with spaces of file systems sucks too.

Anyways, I use the following command to remove spaces in file names within a directory:

# Replace spaces in file names with "-"
for f in *\ *; do mv "$f" "${f// /-}"; done

In this case I replace spaces with a dash.  You can omit the dash if you'd rather there be nothing in place of spaces; underscores is another common pattern.

This script is not recursive, so it wont dive into subdirectories -- I don't usually have that case.

Recent Features

  • By
    5 HTML5 APIs You Didn’t Know Existed

    When you say or read "HTML5", you half expect exotic dancers and unicorns to walk into the room to the tune of "I'm Sexy and I Know It."  Can you blame us though?  We watched the fundamental APIs stagnate for so long that a basic feature...

  • By
    CSS 3D Folding Animation

    Google Plus provides loads of inspiration for front-end developers, especially when it comes to the CSS and JavaScript wonders they create. Last year I duplicated their incredible PhotoStack effect with both MooTools and pure CSS; this time I'm going to duplicate...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Build a Toggling Announcement Slider Using MooTools 1.2

    A few of my customer have asked for me to create a subtle but dynamic (...I know...) way for them to advertise different specials on their website. Not something that would display on every page, but periodically or only the homepage. Using a trick...

  • By
    Event Delegation with MooTools

    Events play a huge role in JavaScript. I can't name one website I've created in the past two years that hasn't used JavaScript event handling on some level. Ask yourself: how often do I inject elements into the DOM and not add an...

Discussion

  1. Danny

    Is there a way to reverse this process? I get file names from the web that have no spaces. I want to put them back in. For example: HowToCookATurkey.txt would return to How To Cook A Turkey.txt

    I haven’t found any of the renaming programs out there that tell you how to do it. Thanks in advance.

  2. h

    you’re a lifesaver! thx!

  3. JD

    New to coding so need some help. Trying to figure out how to edit you code to work for my issue. Have a file, “Outfile-ABC-123 456 789.txt” in a directory, “//dev/out/file/” which has empty spaces in the file name which I need to replace the them with “0” or delete them all together whichever is simpler. Is the code below correct to help resolve my issue? Thanks in advance.

    Before: “Outfile-ABC-123 456 789.txt”

    After: “Outfile-ABC-12304560789.txt” or “Outfile-ABC-123456789.txt”

    My version of your code edited.

    for “Outfile-ABC-*” in (“\\Dev\Out\File\”;) do (mv “$Outfile-ABC-*” “${Outfile-ABC-*// /0}”); done

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!