Hdi2u S08

Basic Linux tips for filenames

• Linux does not deal well with spaces in filenames
• Expect problems when transferring files from Windows.
• Everything is case sensitive
• In genomics its common to use underscores and add useful (meta) information.
• However this can make the filenames quite long.

• To reference filenames with spaces in them, you need to enclose the entire filename in quotation marks so that Linux understands that the space is part of one single name.
• Alternatively, you can "escape" the space using a backslash. For example, if I have a file called my document Linux will see this as two words, "my" and "document".

But you could write either of the following to make it understand you mean a single file:

"my document"
my\ document