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.

  • _cnt0
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    1 year ago

    The backslash escapes the space because it would otherwise denote a seperator to the next argument of the command. ls a b c means invoke ls with the three arguments a,b, and c. ls 'a b c' or ls a\ b\ c means invoke ls with one argument “a b c”. That behavior is universal for pretty much all unix/linux shells (ie bash).