I am trying to make a shell script to do automatic bckups with tar. My problem is that tar stumbles on the spaces in the dir names if they are in a variable. Probiably best shown by example The dir I want to back up is g:/Mark I+/Experimental Data/ I if do this in the script tar -czvpf $NAME_OF_BACKUP.tgz /cygdrive/g/Mark' 'I+/Experimental' 'Data/* it works fine but if I do this DIRECTORY_TO_BACKUP="/cygdrive/g/Mark' 'I+/Experimental' 'Data" tar -czvpf $NAME_OF_BACKUP.tgz $DIRECTORY_TO_BACKUP/* I get tar: Removing leading `/' from member names tar: /cygdrive/g/Mark': Cannot stat: No such file or directory tar: 'I+/Experimental': Cannot stat: No such file or directory tar: 'Data/*: Cannot stat: No such file or directory tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors What am I doing wrong? -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Space-in-Dir-Name-with-shell-script-and-tar-tf3031755.html#a8423703 Sent from the Cygwin Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com. -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/