Space causing problems in shells script

Can somebody tell me why when I run this line it says "Deleted" is not found when it should be looking for a file named "Deleted Messages"? Unfortunately, I cannot just change the file name.

the worst you can do in unix is: filenames containing special
characters like: spaces, newlines, &*¦()? and so on
nota in *nix all except / and the NULL-terminator-char are LEGAL
99% all scripts and most of other progs will crash on this, because
not the shell, but programmers never assume a newline in file name

back to your Q: masking " i mean \" will probalily solve it
my Q: who said you, there is ONLY ONE space (special char) in that string ??
so may be you have to use grep or sed, something like
find $HOME ¦ sed -n '/elete.*essage/p'
NOTA: on modern find, -print is obsolete

You are lacking quotes around your backticks. All subsequent uses of $FILE will also need double quotes.

Although that should be done anyhow (to guard against special characters), have you considered a cd into "$HOME/Deleted Messages" before running the find(1)?



if your find(1) supports it you might consider using -print0 and |xargs -0 instead. Of course, find(1) -exec runme args '{}' \; will work as well but if xargs is appropriate it saves you the extra exec(2)s.