OpenEuphoria

Re: RENAME problem: directories with spaces?

• Posted by Juergen Luethje <j.lue at gmx.de> Sep 04, 2006
• 568 views

Dan Moyer wrote:

> Juergen's suggestion for using "rename" with "system" command,
> }}}
<eucode>
> sequence myvar
> myvar = "\"the old.txt\" \"the new.txt\""    -- or whatever is required
> system("rename " & myvar, 2)
> </eucode>
{{{

> seems like it should have worked, but didn't; I get an error about
>  "bad command format", but when I make it print out, it looks fine, except:
> 
> 
> the path to the file(s) includes more than one directory with SPACES in them,
> which I think is the problem, and I vaguely remember that there's a "trick"
> to making directories with spaces work, but I don't rember what it IS.
> 
> Is there such a trick?  (& what is it if there is)
> (in the code example above, I put the path to the file in front of myvar)

When there are spaces inside a file or directory name or path, it must
be enclosed in double quotes. That's why in my example above I did NOT
write
myvar = "the old.txt the new.txt"

but

myvar = "\"the old.txt\" \"the new.txt\""

This works fine here with EXW.EXE 2.5 on Windows 98, when "the old.txt"
is a file as well as a directory. Now I tried a directory name that
contains a path, e.g.

sequence myvar
myvar = "\"c:\\temp\\the old\" \"c:\\temp\\the new\""
system("rename " & myvar, 2)

and, strange enough, I get the message:
"Invalid parameter - c:\temp\the new".

But by virtue of the infinite wisdom of M$, when the _new_ name doesn't
contain a path at all, everything seems to work fine:

sequence myvar
myvar = "\"c:\\temp\\the old\" \"the new\""
system("rename " & myvar, 2)

As a general solution, I think something like the following can be used:

procedure rename (sequence oldNameWithPath, sequence newNameWithoutPath)
   -- rename a file or directory (both names may contain spaces)
system(sprintf("rename \"%s\" \"%s\"", {oldNameWithPath,
   newNameWithoutPath}), 2)
end procedure

Regards,
   Juergen

-- 
Who is general fault, and why does he read my hard disk?