unix - How do I escape spaces in path for scp copy in Linux?

356
votes

I'm new to linux, I want to copy a file from remote to local system... now I'm using scp command in linux system.. I have some folders or files names are with spaces, when I try to copy that file, it shows the error message: "No such file or directory"

I tried:

scp [email protected]:'/home/5105/test/gg/Untitled Folder/a/qy.jpg' /var/www/try/

I saw the some reference online but I don't understand perfectly, can any one help on this?

how can I escape spaces in file name or directory names during copying...

7
linuxunixubuntuwhitespacescp
Double check that the file really exists. Put the quotes around the whole path, including the login name and ip address. Alternatively, remote the quotes and prepend the space with a backslash instead. – user707650

7 Answers

577
votes

Basically you need to escape it twice, because it's escaped locally and then on the remote end.

There are a couple of options you can do (in bash):

scp [email protected]:"'web/tmp/Master File 18 10 13.xls'" .
scp [email protected]:"web/tmp/Master\ File\ 18\ 10\ 13.xls" .
scp [email protected]:web/tmp/Master\\\ File\\\ 18\\\ 10\\\ 13.xls .
86
votes

works

scp localhost:"f/a\ b\ c" .

scp localhost:'f/a\ b\ c' .

does not work

scp localhost:'f/a b c' .

The reason is that the string is interpreted by the shell before the path is passed to the scp command. So when it gets to the remote the remote is looking for a string with unescaped quotes and it fails

To see this in action, start a shell with the -vx options ie bash -vx and it will display the interpolated version of the command as it runs it.

45
votes

Use 3 backslashes to escape spaces in names of directories:

scp user@host:/path/to/directory\\\ with\\\ spaces/file ~/Downloads

should copy to your Downloads directory the file from the remote directory called directory with spaces.

43
votes

Also you can do something like:

scp foo@bar:"\"apath/with spaces in it/\""

The first level of quotes will be interpreted by scp and then the second level of quotes will preserve the spaces.

15
votes

I had huge difficulty getting this to work for a shell variable containing a filename with whitespace. For some reason using:

file="foo bar/baz"
scp [email protected]:"'$file'"

as in @Adrian's answer seems to fail.

Turns out that what works best is using a parameter expansion to prepend backslashes to the whitespace as follows:

file="foo bar/baz"
file=${file// /\\ }
scp [email protected]:"$file"
6
votes

Sorry for using this Linux question to put this tip for Powershell on Windows 10: the space char escaping with backslashes or surrounding with quotes didn't work for me in this case. Not efficient, but I solved it using the "?" char instead:

for the file "tasks.txt Jun-22.bkp" I downloaded it using "tasks.txt?Jun-22.bkp"

3
votes

scp [email protected]:/home/5105/test/gg/Untitled?Folder/a/qy.jpg /var/www/try/

the ? does a glob on the remote and will match any character, including a space