Navigating to directory with spaces not possible anymore

Question

I'm realtivly new to bash as having always developed on a windows machine (yeah i know). Until recently I have been able to cd into a dir by using

cd a\ dir\ name\ with\ spaces/

but suddenly this does not work any longer. Even using TAB auto-complete it will generate the proper escapes but I'm always met with something like

-bash: cd: a: No such file or directory

a friend mentioned it may be path related. Can anyone shed some light on this issue for me?

---

Below is my .bash_profile

# Exe subshell script
source ~/.bashrc

And the .bashrc

function cs ()
{
  cd $1
  ls
}

# A new version of "cd" which
# prints the directory after cd'ing
cd() {
        builtin cd $1
        pwd
}

Answer 1

A correct replacement would be:

cd() {
    builtin cd "$1"
    pwd
}

You need to quote a variable that contains spaces when it's expanded if you want to retain them.

---

Why do I need to do this?

Let's examine:

• Let's say you call your custom cd function with the argument with\ spaces.
• Obviously, you need to do this, since otherwise, your function would get two arguments, namely with and spaces.
• So, correctly escaping, your function gets with spaces as one argument.
• You pass this argument to builtin cd using $1.
• $1 is automatically expanded to with spaces (since that's what the function received).
• Your call now is builtin cd with spaces/
• That again results in a call to cd with the two arguments with and spaces.

So to fix it:

• Quote $1 with double quotes.
• The command is expanded to builtin cd "with spaces".
• Now cd is correctly called with one argument again.

---

Another possibility is to just use a more generic "$@" instead of "$1" to pass all parameters and not only the first one to another script. This is what you want to do in 99% of all cases.

cd() {
    builtin cd "$@"
    pwd
}

Obviously, the same fix applies to your cs() function.