RE: whitespace in filenames

[Rinehart, Raleigh]

> >
> > > I've got these rules to transcode my .flac music files to .mp3:
> > >
> > >         FLACS := $(shell find ./flac -name "*.flac" -print)
> > >
> > >         MP3 := $(patsubst ./flac/%.flac,./mp3/%.mp3,$(FLACS))
> >
> > Why do you even need these two lines?  They seem extraneous, as you
> > never use the resulting variables.
> 
> Actually this line was missing from my post:
> 
>       all: $(MP3)
> 
> So I only have to type 'make' to encode/update my .flac collection.
> 
> > The problem is that all of the built-in make functions treat variables
> > containing lists of items as "words separated by spaces" and there is no
> > way to change that with quoting.  So if you want to use built-in
> > functions like patsubst and so on that act on variables containing lists
> > of things, prepare for it to not work when an item in the list contains
> > spaces.
> >
> > If you avoid the built-in functions then you might be able to get by
> > with just proper shell quoting alone.
> 
> OK, this makes sense now. Is the culprit 'shell' or 'patsubst' or both?
> 
> Thanks for your clear explanation,
> 
> 


The problem is $(patsubst )  and this will be true for any Make function.

To quote Paul Smith:
> You cannot, in general, use GNU make (or any other standard make) with
> pathnames containing spaces.  It just won't work.  Pathnames in
> makefiles are really parsed as text strings, and virtually every
> function and internal processing splits the strings on whitespace.
> Further, there is no 100% recognized and reliable way to quote
> whitespace in these strings.

What is true for pathnames is also true for filenames.
The only reasonable way I can think of is to either rename all your files to 
not have spaces or use sentinel files (which would be ugly, messy and just 
painful).

You can do a mass rename with something like this in a bash shell (untested)
find . -name *.flac | while read f; do mv "$f" `echo "$f" | sed 's/ /-/g'`; 
done

-raleigh