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
    Serving Fonts from CDN

    For maximum performance, we all know we must put our assets on CDN (another domain).  Along with those assets are custom web fonts.  Unfortunately custom web fonts via CDN (or any cross-domain font request) don't work in Firefox or Internet Explorer (correctly so, by spec) though...

  • By
    Write Simple, Elegant and Maintainable Media Queries with Sass

    I spent a few months experimenting with different approaches for writing simple, elegant and maintainable media queries with Sass. Each solution had something that I really liked, but I couldn't find one that covered everything I needed to do, so I ventured into creating my...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Send Email Notifications for Broken Images Using MooTools AJAX

    One of the little known JavaScript events is the image onError event. This event is triggered when an image 404's out because it doesn't exist. Broken images can make your website look unprofessional and it's important to fix broken images as soon as possible.

  • By
    Sexy Album Art with MooTools or jQuery

    The way that album information displays is usually insanely boring. Music is supposed to be fun and moving, right? Luckily MooTools and jQuery allow us to communicate that creativity on the web. The XHTML A few structure DIVs and the album information. The CSS The 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!