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Forum Discussion
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 ha...
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.
The response: "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: “ may work for some people, but is completely useless for me. Many programs I use are broken because of this dropbox “feature” . I have wasted untold hours because of this. There should not only be no space, there should be no parentheses, and the user should have the option of choosing the directory name altogether.
Ross_S
Dropbox Staff
Dropbox StaffFor those having issue performing a specific routing task:
If you were to outline what you are doing, and the error you are hitting, then the community here may be able to help you resolve the issue. The space shouldn't stop you performing the task you are doing.
Again I would advise; there is a space in our folder name, but this is incredibly standard in computing and in no way unusual.
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.
This has been going on for years and years. Dropbox does not care about its customers clearly.
As a work around.. you can create a virtual drive pointing to a folder in drop box.. so instead of the path being D:/dropbox (Personal)/myfolder.. the virtual drive would create a pointer and you would be able to use Z:/myfolder..
This gets you around the issue of the space and the parentheses.. atleast in some cases..
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?
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.
Any program that constructs an absolute path name, eg
$ realpath . /home/xxx/Dropbox (Personal)/Clients
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.
