Spaces in file names passed as arguments

txixco has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi all.

I've got the following code to standarize my movie titles:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

for (<@ARGV>) {
    # Change spaces to _
    my $new = $_;
    $new =~ s/\s/_/g;
    rename($_, $new) or die "Cannot rename '$_' to '$new': $!";

    # Capitalize
    my $new2 = $new;
    $new2 =~ s/(^|_)(\w)/$1\U$2/g;
    print "$_ -> $new2\n";
    rename($new, $new2) or die "Cannot rename '$new' to '$new2': $!";
}
[download]

The problem is exactly because the files have spaces in the name. I've searched for a solution and I only find that I have to quote the argument; this partially works, as it works if I use something like titulize.pl "*.avi", but not if I use titulize.pl "test spacefull name.avi". Moreover, I'd like if possible to pass the file names as in the normal way, as every other command line program.

Could somebody bring me some light about how to pass file names with spaces as arguments?

Best regards.

Update: Excuse me all of you who have send me your ideas; I'm having some problems with my computer, so I will answer all of you as soon as I could try your solutions.

Comment on Spaces in file names passed as arguments Select or Download Code

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Re: Spaces in file names passed as arguments by toolic (Bishop) on Sep 08, 2011 at 15:55 UTC
It works for me if I get rid of the angle brackets (I'm on linux): `for (@ARGV) {` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: Spaces in file names passed as arguments by txixco (Novice) on Sep 10, 2011 at 05:07 UTC
Thank you very much, it works :-). I thought that the only way to list files were using globbing.	[reply]
Re: Spaces in file names passed as arguments by Utilitarian (Vicar) on Sep 08, 2011 at 15:50 UTC
Using `find` and double quoting the {} in an exec allows you to do the whole library in one pass `find ./ -name \\ \ -exec perl -e ' for (@ARGV){$new=$_;$new=~s/\s+/_ +/g;rename($_,$new);}' "{}" \;` [download] Works for me `print "Good ",qw(night morning afternoon evening)[(localtime)[2]/6]," fellow monks."`	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Spaces in file names passed as arguments by aaron_baugher (Curate) on Sep 08, 2011 at 16:00 UTC
If you add a line like `print "Doing $_\n";` at the beginning of your for loop, you'll see that @ARGV is getting your argument already broken up into 3 parts. In other words, it's not a problem with your script, but with the shell parsing the arguments before they're passed to your script. One solution would be to escape the spaces within your quotes: `titulize.pl "test\ spacefull\ name.avi"`. Edit: Never mind this answer; toolic caught the real problem, the brackets around @ARGV. Hard to tell what that's actually doing, but ordinarily just quoting your arguments should get them into @ARGV properly.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: Spaces in file names passed as arguments by Anonymous Monk on Sep 08, 2011 at 18:04 UTC
Hard to tell what that's actually doing Not at all :) `$ perl -MO=Deparse -le " for(<@ARGV>){print} " BEGIN { $/ = "\n"; $\ = "\n"; } use File::Glob (); foreach $_ (glob(join $", @ARGV)) { print $_; } -e syntax OK` [download] glob	[reply] [d/l]