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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 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.
Adding my +1 for fixing this problem.
I'm pretty shocked that this is something Dropbox went ahead with in the 1st instance. I'm going to try the symlink work-around mentioned here, but otherwise it just rendered my corproate account pointless.
Can't. Believe. They. Did. This.
It has been 1.5 years and the problem still persists. Fixing this should not be so hard, eh? It's really frustrating when an application forces you to a specific pattern/naming/setting.
Love Dropbox? YES! Think it could be even better? YES! Tell us how. Remove the space!
As I am the person who originated this question, do you suppose someone could tell me what the solution is?
Because I have to keep doing this, I'm providing this step-by-step for macOS.
After installing Dropbox through Sydney University business account, it creates a folder called "Dropbox (Sydney Uni)" in my home directory by default, which breaks all my code in shared projects. So I want to rename the default folder to "Dropbox" (I don't have a personal Dropbox account).
After installing Dropbox and once it has finished downloading all my files to the default directory, the blue badges will disappear and be replaced with a green tick on all the completely downloaded files. I can now begin.
1. Quit Dropbox (select the cog in the Dropbox menubar item).
2. In Finder, rename the "Dropbox (Sydney Uni)" folder to "Dropbox"
3. Open Terminal and navigate to your home directory
cd ~
4. Create a symlink to the "Dropbox" folder with the same name as the default Dropbox directory (in my case "Dropbox (Sydney Uni)")
ln -s Dropbox Dropbox\ \(Sydney\ Uni\)
5. Hide the new symlink so you don't have to be reminded of the stupid decisions of the Dropbox development team every day
chflags -h hidden Dropbox\ \(Sydney\ Uni\)
6. Check my work
ls -l drwx------@ 12 rich staff 384 19 Nov 21:10 Dropbox lrwxr-xr-x 1 rich staff 7 19 Nov 21:27 Dropbox (Sydney Uni) -> Dropbox
7. Restart Dropbox. It shouldn't complain about anything since it sees the new symlink as the default folder
This is a MAJOR issue to me. I teach information technology in the college of business, and I tell my students NEVER to put a space in a folder or filename because it causes SO MANY problems when moving between different operating systems. Why would Dropbox do this? I'm just now deciding upon whether or not to go with Dropbox Business, and this issue decided it for me. I'm not going to do it - because of the stupid space.
I still have the same prolbem. My scripts don't work! What can I do on linux?
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.
Basically, allow the renaming of the folder "Dropbox (CompanyName)" or at least give an option to use a "programmer_friendly" name, such as "Dropbox_CompanyName".
This has been asked many times before and it seems something really simple to implement and REALLY benefitial for programmers. Just today I had to debug a program only to realize that the problem was the dropbox folder name.
Yes, I can do sym links, renaming tricks, placing troublesome programs and files outside dropbox in folders with friendly paths (and then remember to backup them some other way), but honestly, I shouldn't have to and I can't predict which of the software I use will fail due to your naming conventions.
For the record, a similar idea is found at https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Dropbox/Can-you-remove-the-space-in-the-dropbox-folder-name-quot-Dropbox/idi-p/22500 but it shows as "Solved" when that's clearly not the case.
Thank you.
I cannot use Dropbox for software development if I try to connect two accounts, say a personal and a business account. This is because for some reason Dropbox demands to use a space in the forced folder name "Dropbox (Personal)" or "Dropbox (Business)". The software I use, which millions of developers use, QT.IO cannot accept a space in the foldername and I cannot change it myself as far as I can tell. So I have to revert to a single account with a folder named "Dropbox."
How about "Dropbox-Personal" and "Dropbox-Business" instead? Or let us decide, or make it easier to tell us how to change it if it can be changed now...
Same here. I need to run Batch-files inside my Dropbox. But because of the space between the "name" and "dropbox" it won't work.
There needs to be an option to change this.
- Walter
Dropbox Staff
Hey there vedentis - sorry to hear about this.
As this is not currently an option, I'm passing your comments along to the team for consideration - thank you for your feedback! I am also moving the post under the "Share an Idea" section so other users can find and upvote it too.
If there's anything else I can do, please let me know.
True.
I took me a couple of hours to work around this in my batch files. I think Dropbox needs to consider that nowadays programmers and companies use dropbox to share like portable apps, batch files etc and keep those in sync over the team.
Maybe this wasn't thought of in the beginning. but as time changes so do the needs of the users.
First and foremost, Dropbox should ask users changing to business that the folder name will be changing. And it should ask for its new name. Also placing an underscore instead of space would make things a lot easier for many users.
This process of changing to business messed up my PC from the beginning. making my dropbox unusable and I needed to redownload my whole 300GB. So my PC was working a couple of hours until I could use it again.
So there is a lot of improvement necessary and since I read about this issue in several threads, some years old, I wonder why there has been no solution to this already?
It's a paid product!!!
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.
- Jay
