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

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Check All/None Checkboxes Using MooTools

    There's nothing worse than having to click every checkbox in a list. Why not allow users to click one item and every checkbox becomes checked? Here's how to do just that with MooTools 1.2. The XHTML Note the image with the ucuc ID -- that...

  • By
    Full Width Textareas

    Working with textarea widths can be painful if you want the textarea to span 100% width.  Why painful?  Because if the textarea's containing element has padding, your "width:100%" textarea will likely stretch outside of the parent container -- a frustrating prospect to say the least.  Luckily...

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!