[herbsman]

Hey all. Real basic terminal quesion here.

How the heck do I go inside a directory that has spaces or multiple words? i.e. all I want to do is navigate inside a folder titled Nature Documentaries via terminal. I first go to the local directory that has the folder: cd movies, I'm in, then I type in: cd Nature Movies and I keep getting a 'No such file or directory' error message. I've tried adding in slashes, symbols, but it's a no-go.

It's a total noob question I realize this! I'm taking some Unix classes and I'm stuck on the first assignment!

[slpdLoad]

cd Nature\ Documentaries

You could also type something like

cd Nat*

to select anything that starts with "Nat", which would select your Nature Documentaries folder if it's the only thing that starts that way.

[drp]

Originally Posted by herbsman 

How the heck do I go inside a directory that has spaces or multiple words? i.e. all I want to do is navigate inside a folder titled Nature Documentaries via terminal.

This may be more information then you were looking for, but for the sake of being complete:

The other poster mentioned part of the answer, but there are several ways to handle filenames with spaces or other characters that have secondary meanings to the shell.

1) You can "escape" the offending character. The standard shell escape character is "\". Any special character preceded by a backslash will be used literally and not interpreted. As the other poster mentioned, you can

cd Nature\ Documentaries

2) You can quote the string. There are two kinds of quotes for this purpose: single and double quotes. Single quotes interpret their contents literally. Double quotes still allow for variable substitution. As a result, you could

cd "Nature Documentaries"

-or-

cd 'Nature Documentaries'

However, due to the subtle difference with variable handling, cd "$HOME" will go to your home directory, while cd '$HOME' will look for a directory called $HOME.

3) There is a special case with the "-" character. If it starts a word, most programs will attempt to treat it as an option and not a filename. If your example was named "-Nature Documentaries" you need to let the command line know that "-Nature" isn't a program option with "--".

cd -- "-Nature Documentaries"

4) Of course, you can use wildcards if only one item will match.

cd Nature?Documentaries

-or-

cd Nature*

5) Lastly, if you're using quotes, the entire program argument needs to be quoted. This is different than Microsoft Windows command line

cd "/Users/Your Name/Nature Documentaries"

not

cd /Users/"Your Name"/"Nature Documentaries"

[herbsman]

you all rock! much thanks!

[tripletaker]

You can also press Tab to autocomplete words.

For example:

Type "cd Nat" without the quotes and then press Tab and if there is only one file starting with Nat then it will autocomplete Nature Documentaries. You can even do "cd N" and then Tab if there is only one file starting with N.

[turtle777]

Yeah, auto-complete is the way to go.

-t