Question

I want to set an environment variable that has space in it.

It is a path to a folder and the folder name is:

/home/mehrabib/my video

I edit .bashrc and add the following line to it:

export $VIDEO=/home/mehrabib/my\ video

and run these commands:

echo $VIDEO
cd $VIDEO

The result is:

/home/mehrabib/my video
/home/mehrabib/my :no such file or directory

I change it to

export $VIDEO=/home/mehrabib/my\\\ video

and run these commands:

echo $VIDEO
cd $VIDEO

The result is:

/home/mehrabib/my\ video
/home/mehrabib/my\ :no such file or directory

What should I do?

Answer 1

You should do

export VIDEO="/home/mehrabib/my video"

and to sum Dan’s comments up also do

cd "$VIDEO"

which will expand to

cd "/home/mehrabib/my video"

again.

Personally, I’ve come to prefer the ${VIDEO} syntax.