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
    Designing for Simplicity

    Before we get started, it's worth me spending a brief moment introducing myself to you. My name is Mark (or @integralist if Twitter happens to be your communication tool of choice) and I currently work for BBC News in London England as a principal engineer/tech...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Create Twitter-Style Buttons with the Dojo Toolkit

    I love that JavaScript toolkits make enhancing web pages incredibly easy. Today I'll cover an effect that I've already coded with MooTools: creating a Twitter-style animated "Sign In" button. Check out this five minute tutorial so you can take your static...

  • By
    MooTools Equal Heights Plugin:  Equalizer

    Keeping equal heights between elements within the same container can be hugely important for the sake of a pretty page. Unfortunately sometimes keeping columns the same height can't be done with CSS -- you need a little help from your JavaScript friends. Well...now you're...

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!