Filenames With Spaces

Filename with space may be okay in Windows environment, but not for UNIX. Recently I encountered a lot of partial backup due to filenames ended with space(s). You will be surprised to see the kind of files the user created or transferred from Windows to UNIX and I blogged about it a year ago.

To be able to evenly split the backup streams into roughly equal amount of size, my script uses find /some/dir -mount -type f -ls to generate the file list. The output will then be piped to a while loop to sum up the file size. However, shell will auto-collapse white space into a single space if you do not quote the variable. Although quoting variable is able to preserve white spaces, it will not be able to tackle filename ends with space

By applying padding (I used "==" in my below test case) to the end of the filename, I am able to preserve the original filename. Simply truncate the padding before writing to file list will resolve all these white space issue.

BTW, my environment is running Solaris.

$ touch 'a' 'b' 'c' ' start1space' '  start2space' '   start3space' \
        'mid 1space' 'mid  2space' 'mid   3space' \
        'end1space ' 'end2space  ' 'end3space   '

$ find . -type f -ls | while read x x x x x x x x x x filename
do
  echo --$filename--
done                               
--./a--
--./b--
--./c--
--./ start1space--
--./ start2space--
--./ start3space--
--./mid 1space--
--./mid 2space--
--./mid 3space--
--./end1space--
--./end2space--
--./end3space--

$ find . -type f -ls | while read x x x x x x x x x x filename
do
  echo "--$filename--"
done                             
--./a--
--./b--
--./c--
--./ start1space--
--./  start2space--
--./   start3space--
--./mid 1space--
--./mid  2space--
--./mid   3space--
--./end1space--
--./end2space--
--./end3space--

$ find . -type f -ls | sed 's/$/==/' | while read x x x x x x x x x x filename
do
  echo "--${filename%==}--"
done
--./a--
--./b--
--./c--
--./ start1space--
--./  start2space--
--./   start3space--
--./mid 1space--
--./mid  2space--
--./mid   3space--
--./end1space --
--./end2space  --
--./end3space   --