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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.
I use prebuilt linux programs on my mac, not scripts or codes I can edit. They use for example pulldown menus with file choosers. These only work with legal linux directory and filenames. Although there is a way to quote around spaces and odd-characters in a linux shell, it is not necessarily so inside a widget or program. So all of these codes are broken. I can use them by typing in the whole huge directory path for every single file I want to open, which takes minutes and is mistake prone, compared with simply clicking, which is the intent. This is ALL because dropbox has illegal directory names at the top level that CANNOT be changed by the user. This is unacceptible. I care NOTHING about all your new features which I do not use. I simply would like basic clean operations, which is not there. Also a symbolic links also do not work in this context for me.
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?
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.
Any program that constructs an absolute path name, eg
$ realpath . /home/xxx/Dropbox (Personal)/Clients
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.
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?!
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.
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.
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.
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