Question

I’m trying in a shell script to copy a predefined set of Chrome bookmarks to the location where Chrome keeps them on a Mac (~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default). In the script I have:

#!/bin/sh
bookmarks_dir="$HOME/Library/Application\ Support/Google/Chrome/Default"
cp -v "bookmarks/Bookmarks" "$bookmarks_dir"

But when I run this I get:

cp: /Users/aparkin/Library/Application\ Support/Google/Chrome/Default: No such file or directory

If I copy & paste the path in the error message above and do the cp by hand:

cp -v bookmarks/Bookmarks /Users/aparkin/Library/Application\ Support/Google/Chrome/Default

It copies fine, so the directory does in fact exist. It seems to be the space in the path that’s tripping things up.

What am I missing? I thought if a variable is enclosed in quotes that spaces in filenames no longer cause problems?

Answer 1

Get rid of the \ in the $bookmarks_dir definition. It’s being treated as a literal \: if you did an $echo bookmarks_dir you’d see it.

The \ is only useful if you won’t put quotes around the string. So,

bookmarks_dir=$HOME/Library/Application\ Support/Google/Chrome/Default

would also work.