4J

As a rule I avoid directory names with spaces, but from time to time you have to deal with these oddities in your bash scripts. Here is a quick script that demonstrates how to work around this problem...

To test, create a directory like "/tmp/some dir". Change into this directory and run the script. You should see something like this:

 1 $ /tmp/test.sh
 2 Attempting to go back to '/tmp/some dir'
 3 /tmp/test.sh: line 6: cd: /tmp/some: No such file or directory
 4 /tmp/some dir
 5 DONE

As you can see, it breaks at line 3. Here is the script:

 
 1 #!/bin/bash
 2
 3 HERE=`pwd`
 4 cd /tmp
 5 echo "Attempting to go back to '$HERE'"
 6 cd $HERE
 7 if [ $? -gt 0 ]
 8 then
 9         cd "$HERE"
10         if [ $? -gt 0 ]
11         then
12                 echo "FAILED"
13         fi
14 fi
15 pwd
16 echo DONE

The trick lies in line 9 - using quotes :-)