Bash script and whitespaces in file names

Question

I’m having a problem with filenames having whitespace in a bash script on Mac OSX:

name="My File" #file name
version="1.0.0"

echo "Copying AAX..."
mkdir aax/
cp -R "/Library/Application Support/Avid/Audio/Plug-Ins/""${name}".aaxplugin aax

echo "Copying AU..."
mkdir au/
cp -R "~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components/""${name}".component au

echo "Copying VST2..."
mkdir vst/
cp -R "~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST/""${name}".vst vst

It goes perfectly fine with the AAX file, but it won’t find the file for AU and VST. I tried quoting different parts of the command lines, but I always get “no such file or directory” for those two.

What’s wrong there?

Thanks!

l'L'l · Accepted Answer · 2019-05-15 10:50:51Z

1

Two things:

Tilde (~) does not expand in quotes; use $HOME instead if you want to use it that way.
If you want to use tilde then only ${name} should be double-quoted (to prevent word-splitting).

So that would look like this (1):

"$HOME/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components/${name}".component au

Or like this (2):

~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components/"${name}".component au

edited May 15, 2019 at 10:50

answered May 15, 2019 at 10:45

l'L'l

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3 Comments

Httqm Over a year ago

Aren't the curly braces redundant with double quotes ?

l'L'l Over a year ago

@Httqm: it would still need to be double-quoted; often curly brackets are used for better readability.

Luca Capozzi Over a year ago

Thanks. I didn't know that the tilde wouldn't expand while quoted. Now it works as expected.

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