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Fawzi Masri avatar Server

Any linux package that helps me deal with spaces and parenthesis in file names

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Fawzi Masri

i a have an ubuntu backup fileserver. I backup CAD file that are used on a windows system. needless to say the users are very generous with spaces and parenthesis in their filenames. It is a nightmare to try to rsync a file out of backup. Here is an example:

sudo rsync -a user@192.168.1.211:/media/bak/bim/daily.5/CURRENT JOBS/17/17142 Building (ECR) - 55900 EL CAMINO REAL, MENLO PARK/PRICING/FOR PRICING 02-15-2018 (BUDGET UPDATE BLDGS 1, 2, & 3)/01_Drawings/500 ECR - Office Building _2/500 ECR - B2 - BS 1.8.18 - Civil Set.pdf .

is there way to deal with such names other than by simply adding quotes since i have to escape the parenthesis as well as spaces? I was hoping there would be a package that allows linux to deal with such file names?

thanks

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Zoredache
That kinda path almost makes me think it would be some kind of GUI, or TUI to transfer files. If you really must deal with paths, I would probably just put the path into a file, and use the `--include-from` option to select files.
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John Mahowald avatar Server
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John Mahowald

rsync has a large number of options to control selecting files based on glob-like patterns. For example, --include-from=~/restore-pattern.txt and the file might contain new line delimited patterns with just enough to identify the files:

/media/bak/bim/daily.5/CURRENT JOBS/17/17142**02-15-2018**500 ECR - B2 - BS 1.8.18 - Civil Set.pdf

As rsync reads the file, it does not need to be safe for the shell. Note ** matches slash, which is convenient but confirm this matches only what you want.

Unfortunately, POSIX-like environments have no consistent way of doing file names correctly. See David Wheeler's Filenames and Pathnames in Shell: How to do it Correctly for the annoying details. In particular, null is the only character guaranteed to not be in a path name. Most shell scripts do not handle this, they will break in the corner case of input file names with new lines in them.

Null-separated pathnames are one way to maximize the file names accepted by tools. With GNU findutils and rysnc, could use find -print0 to write out a list of file names, then rsync --from0 --files-from= to transfer those files. When doing restores, saving the exact file list may be useful for future reference.

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