While I was trying to copy a load of files from one server to another I found a problem I’ve seen time and time again, rsync with filenames that have spaces in them. While normally this can be easily fixed via number of methods:

rsync ‘jon@example.com:/remote/path/filename with spaces.txt’ /local/path/

Notice the quotes around the remote path, you can also use the -s (or –protect-args) which will send the command as-is to the remote.

So I was working on a script a while ago to backup all my email on my Linux box. I put together a fairly simple bash script to delve into home directories and pick out the Maildir and back it up. Great!

DRIVE="/dev/sdb1" HOME="/home/" LIST="/tmp/backlist_$$.txt" # mount $DRIVE /backup set $(date) for DIR in `find /home/ -name “Maildir” -print`; do NAME=`echo $DIR|awk -F\/ {’ print $3 ‘}` tar vcfz “/backup/Mail/mail_full_${NAME}_$6-$2-$3.tgz” $DIR umount /backup