If you want to work with files that have spaces or special characters in the filenames, you may have to use quotes. For instance, if you wanted to create a file that has a space in the name, you could use the following:
/dev/null
Section 43.12
% cp /dev/null 'a file with spaces in the name'Normally, the shell uses spaces to determine the end
of each argument. Quoting (Section 27.12, Section 27.13) changes that — for
example, the cp command above has only two
arguments. You can also use a backslash (\)
before a special character. The example below will rename a file with a space in
the name, changing the space to an underscore ( _ ):
% mv a\ file a_fileUsing the same techniques, you can deal with any character in a filename:
% mv '$a' a
At worst, a space in a filename makes the filename
difficult to use as an argument. Other characters are dangerous to use in a
filename. In particular, using ? and * in a filename is playing with fire. If you want
to delete the file a?, you may end up deleting more than
the single file.
— BB