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Vincent M.9
10 years agoNew member | Level 1
Can you remove the space in the dropbox folder name ("Dropbox (Company-Name)")?
I'm using my companies business dropbox account. And it created a folder called "Dropbox (my companies name here)".
Is there a way to remove the space between "Dropbox" and "("? I don't want to have a space in the path. So the folder name will become "Dropbox-Company" or "Dropbox_Company" or something, but not space.
It seems impossible.
Hi all,
Unfortunately, it's not possible to change the name of Dropbox folder, as many of you have discovered.
If you are using it for scripts then the best thing would firstly to parse the info.json and grab the path from there. The JSON is located:
Mac/Linux:
~/.dropbox/info.json
Windows will be one of these two paths:
%APPDATA%\Dropbox\info.json
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Dropbox\info.json
I say this as if you were to move your Dropbox folder at anytime then this would, of course, break any paths that explicitly referenced an exact folder path.
On a side note, spaces within file paths shouldn't cause issues within scripts, it's fairly normal to have some spaces in there, just ensure your path string is correctly formatted and your script should be fine.
139 Replies
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- jkhile8 years agoExplorer | Level 4
OK -- one very annoying example is that a number of node modules won't install correctly using 'npm install' with a space in the path. An example is better-sqlite3; everytime I need to install it, I need to copy the entire source directory to a different path without the space character, then copy it back after installing.
Yes, I could ask the package maintainers to fix their install scripts, but that is not the only package that has the issue and asking for a fix from the developer could take days or weeks -- so not a practical solution in the middle of a development project.
Why can't you simply recognize that this is causing significant problems for some of your most sophisticated users (and influencers) and address the core problem rather than trying to excuse the flaw?
- chasrmartin8 years agoHelpful | Level 6
Look, do you have any developers on your staff who could talk to you about what developers do? There are a bunch of UNIX-based tools that do not cope well with pathnames containing blanks. What's more, having been a developer for nigh on to 50 years, I am utterly certain that there is somewhere in your code that sets up these paths and that could be changed to give more flexibility, probably -- if it was at all competently designed and coded -- by changing just a few lines of code.
I'm paying for a terabyte of storage because I use my Dropbox for all my working files. now I can't. I am not pleased, and peeing on my leg and telling me it's rain isn't going to make it better.
- chasrmartin8 years agoHelpful | Level 6
Any program that constructs an absolute path name, eg
$ realpath . /home/xxx/Dropbox (Personal)/Clients
- d78577e419538 years agoHelpful | Level 6
Hey, hey,
It's not about the space character being "incredibly standard in computing". It's about allowing your clients to modify the name of the folder, while you're enforcing a certain pattern.
For example, you have people who use terminal and autocompletion to access folders. Imagine situation:
$ ls
Dropbox (Personal)
Dropbox (Acme Inc)
You start typing with autocompletion:
$ cd Dr[TAB]
Shell completes it to:
$ cd Dropbox\ \(_
You need to then type in P or A and then press TAB again to get the full name.
Symbolic links, looking up JSON are all workarounds. Just give us what we want and we'll go away. We just want to name our dropbox folder something different, renaming entities is incredibly standard in computing and in now way unusual.
- recohen37 years agoHelpful | Level 5
Amazingly this problemn continues! I waste untold hours! I will not renew dropbox given the lack of responsness. Who needs new features when the basic functionality is poor?!
- terrestre7 years agoExplorer | Level 4
I just can not imagine that a such a big team of DROPBOX can not ( or do not want to ) solve this basic problem of naming files ans space issues. It is really unprofessional.
- chasrmartin7 years agoHelpful | Level 6You’ve mark this as solBed. It’s not solved. What you’ve done is sad you can’t be bothered to fix a trivial issue that’s causing trouble for customers.
- chasrmartin7 years agoHelpful | Level 6
Look, how long have you been programming? Like it or not all UNIX based systems including Mac and lI UC parse command line arguments by tokenizing at whitespace. From the command line you can work around the house sometimes with quoting. However, the fact is that many many unix based programs use that convention and the code for those is not accessible so they can’t be changed.
- joechip907 years agoNew member | Level 2
Yes another upvote from me. Putting a space in the base name and *then not allowing the user to change it* means that it makes Dropbox almost useless for us as I breaks a lot of our third-party software. My current recommendation to my boss is for us to cancel out Dropbox subscription.
- dmarchant7 years agoExplorer | Level 4
Like many dropbox business users, the space is the Dropbox folder name continusly causes headaches.
I know that there are workarounds for all of these problems, hower it should be possible to just fix the problem so that workarounds wouldn't be constantly necessary - please do not mark this issue as solved while telling us (the customers) that spaces in paths are commonplace (they are not) or that we should "fix" our workflows by parseing a json file.
I know that currently there is no way to rename our dropbox folder. What I would like to know is whether or not this is ever going to be addressed. A no would be far better than no answer at all, which is what has been provided for the past three years.
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