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
    Telephone Link Protocol

    We've always been able to create links with protocols other than the usual HTTP, like mailto, skype, irc ,and more;  they're an excellent convenience to visitors.  With mobile phone browsers having become infinitely more usable, we can now extend that convenience to phone numbers: The tel...

  • By
    9 Incredible CodePen Demos

    CodePen is a treasure trove of incredible demos harnessing the power of client side languages.   The client side is always limited by what browsers provide us but the creativity and cleverness of developers always pushes the boundaries of what we think the front end can do.  Thanks to CSS...

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!