make a string (with spaces) of a path usable for rm

Asked Feb 02 '16 at 09:03

Active Feb 02 '16 at 10:13

Viewed 25 times

I have an array (pfad) containing a filepath as a string f.e. (got it with tree and some sed stuff)

/media/usb1/Filme/Jersey\ Boys\ (2014)/review.txt

I want to delete this file:

rm ${pfad[$j]}

Obviously this doesn't work, because we don't have the correct format to access directorys with spaces. I figured out it should be like this:

rm /media/usb1/Filme/Jersey\ Boys\ \(2014\)/review.txt

So I am missing '\' twice. once in front of "(" and once behind "2014". How can I adjust this?

I guess it's possible to replace (2014) with $2014$ via sed, but that is pretty sloppy and I I had to do it for every year.

If there is a better way to get the absolute full path (and size) of every file in a directory and its subfolders in two (or one) arrays, I woud like to learn. I am free to use perl / ruby or what ever Raspbian has to offer. (Would be nice if it is kinda ressource friendly.) Thanks for reading.

EDIT (my) workaround:

use tree -N it creates the output without " \ ". after that put the variable (array) as mentioned in the comments in "$variable".

edited Feb 02 '16 at 10:13

asked Feb 02 '16 at 09:03

user3715758

I'm not sure I understand what exactly bothers you. – Oleksandr Kravchuk Feb 02 '16 at 09:08
I can't remove the review.txt because `rm ${pfad[$j]}` doesn't work. – user3715758 Feb 02 '16 at 09:20
I need to get `rm ${pfad[$j]}` working with the given value of f.e. `/media/usb1/Filme/Jersey\ Boys\ (2014)/review.txt`. I need to remove multiple files with specific size and a specific name etc. in different folders. I have multiple if conditions, if they are fine I just want to `rm ${pfad[$j]}`. I can't adjust every filepath by hand. – user3715758 Feb 02 '16 at 09:34
1

@user3715758 quote the variable... – 123 Feb 02 '16 at 09:41
I found another solution but thank you guys. – user3715758 Feb 02 '16 at 09:52
@user3715758 post it here; may be useful for someone in the feature. – Oleksandr Kravchuk Feb 02 '16 at 10:03
You should not parse the output of `tree` or `ls` in the first place. Use globs instead. – gniourf_gniourf Feb 02 '16 at 10:16

make a string (with spaces) of a path usable for rm

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