I installed some software and I think afterwards I was navigating through CLI and noticed that some directories or some files in some directories had single quotation marks around the names. They don’t appear in the GUI. How do I get rid of them? Do I have to use a recursive command to delete the quotation marks for the entire file system?
I’ve actually had this problem a few times in the past but cannot recall why they happen nor what the solution was.
I understand why this is weird to you, but it’s supposed to work like that and you should really keep it that way.
Otherwise you have no way of knowing whether your directory contains a file called “a b c”, or three files called “a” “b” and “c” (all without the quotation marks obviously).
In Linux a blank space denotes a seperator. So basically, a space means “A new thing begins now”.
So e.g. if you use the cat command to print the contents of a file called “a b c”, and you do it like so: “cat a b c”, it will try to print the contents of the three files called “a” “b” and “c”.
The other way you can go is to escape the space character. Escaping tells a program that the following character has no special meaning and is used only in it’s meaning as pure text. In Linux you escape using this character: .
So “a b c” is equivalent to a\ b\ c.
All in all, this is a weird thing to get used to as a beginner, but it’s an important and even helpful thing.
All in all, there are some things that are pretty weird when you first switch to Linux, but most of them have a reason. You can bend Linux to do whatever you want and you can even make it very Windows-y if you want. But in many cases there are reasons behind design decisions and bending them often results in issues down the road.
But in the end, it’s your PC, and it’s Linux, so do what you want.
Command line in general, not just Linux.
Forgetting to quoteblock spaces in Windows won’t be pleasant either (especially when Windows has a Sydtem directory called “Program Files”.