Ah yes, there's little as frustrating as trying to fully figure out how Unix -- even Mac OS X Tiger -- works with spaces. I had a bit of trouble figuring out exactly what you were asking here, but fortunately we had a bit of back and forth in email and I now see what you're asking.
My answer is in two parts, however. The first question you're asking is actually
can I defer evaluation of spaces in a directory name twice? and the second question is
can PATH handle directories with spaces in them?.
As far as I can ascertain, there is no easy way to accomplish what you want with the
cd command because it's a built-in shell primitive, so its arguments aren't expanded. But using
eval to force evaluation makes it work without quotes:
$ mkdir "test me"
$ x="test me"
$ cd $x
-bash: cd: test: No such file or directory
$ x="test\ me"
$ cd $x
-bash: cd: test\: No such file or directory
$ eval cd $x
$ pwd
/Users/taylor/Desktop/test me
I admit, that's not a very satisfying answer! You can't do this in a shell script, either, because you'd change the directory
of the subshell running the script, not the parent shell you were using. No good answer, I'm afraid.
In the second case, however, there is a simple solution. Here's a typical approach to tweaking the
PATH to add a directory:
PATH=${PATH}:/home/taylor/mybin
To add a directory to the path with spaces, just use a backslash as needed. Here's a proof of concept sequence:
$ cd 'test me'
$ cat > mytestscript
#!/bin/sh
echo this is my test script
exit 0
$ echo $PATH
/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/sw/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/Users/taylor/bin:/sw/bin
$ PATH=${PATH}:"/Users/taylor/Desktop/test me"
$ mytestscript
this is my test script
Hope that helps. If someone has a suggestion on how to solve the former puzzle of a variable that names a directory that contains spaces but that can nonetheless be given to
cd, I'd love to hear about it!
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I've had the some problem using bash for in, and it breaking up lists with spaces when I didn't want it to. My solution is below, don't know how applicable it is.
#!/bin/bash
SEARCH_DIR=$1
LOOK_FOR=$2
PERMISSION=$3
GROUP=$4
#find directories and filter.
for a in `find "$SEARCH_DIR" -type d | grep $LOOK_FOR | sed 's\ \_-_\g'`
do
#perform chmod/chgrp on 'a'.
a=`echo "$a" | sed -e 's\_-_\ \g'`
chmod -Rv $PERMISSION "$a"
chgrp -Rv $GROUP "$a"
done;
exit 0