point noted . I needed to add that spaces in file names are problamatic but I 
also found ( ) to be an issue and ' is an issue too.
The script will will work for ( and ) but it does not seem to work for ' 
single quote

Anthony

On Thursday 31 January 2002 08:06 am, you wrote:
> > Wow..this thread is still going..I was the original poster. And yes
> > spaces in file names ARE evil and unnatural...as I found out......
> >
> > I run a seperate script initially to get rid of the spaces. It looks like
> > this.
> >
> > #!/bin/sh
> > #remove white space from files with the tr command
> > for i in *;do
> >     mv "$i"  `echo $i | tr ' ' '-' `
> > done
> >
> > It seems to do the trick
>
> It may work, but for the sake of completion, you should know that the
> classic replacement for a space in the Unix world is an underbar, not a
> hyphen.
>
> When I worked at Motorola I maintained a very large library of software and
> work files that everyone in our group contributed to. We were mainly a Unix
> house, but there were a few people who were heavily Windows oriented who
> would occasionally put files in there that had spaces in the names. When
> this happened, a bunch of maintenance scripts I had written would break and
> send me error messages in email. Finally I wrote a script to be run as a
> cron job to ferret out the culprits, change their names, and notify their
> owners, to be run every night before the maintenance stuff.