Finder "Copy ... as Pathname" adds odd quotes

Question

Finder "Copy ... as Pathname" adds odd quotes

Finder has awesome feature "Copy ... as Pathname" for any file.

On all macOSes before Sequoia it copies plain path to the clipboard

Since Sequoia if the path contains whitespaces, clipboard starts to contain single quotes around it, which is very inconvenient, especially for pasting into Xcode.

Before: /System/Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor.app

After: '/System/Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor.app'

It does not makes lots of sense, but forces to do additional steps to remove quotes

Is there any way to disable this "feature"?

MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 15.0

Posted on Sep 18, 2024 8:00 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

volodymyrfromdnipropetrovsk Author

Level 1

12 points

Sep 18, 2024 9:23 AM in response to Matti Haveri

That is not good also to fix one behaviour and break another one.

Also such copy-pasting in not consistent: previously there was no single quotes at all, but for now they could appear randomly (for user who paste the text)

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Answer 2

Sep 23, 2024 11:45 AM in response to volodymyrfromdnipropetrovsk

I hate this change. My job requires me to frequently paste the paths of multiple files in to a text field online and before it would automatically break each file to it's own line and didn't include the single quotes. That behavior was perfect for my needs. I hate that they removed this and didn't just make it an option to turn on or off.

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Answer 3

sjkiss

Level 1

18 points

Nov 5, 2024 11:37 AM in response to Jackmacuser4

This is a ridiculous change. Make my life harder for no reason.

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Answer 4

Sep 18, 2024 8:59 AM in response to volodymyrfromdnipropetrovsk

Beneath the Finder, macOS is a UNIX operating system that requires that its paths that contain space have that space escaped either with quotes (single or double), or a '\' character.

There is no means to disable this feature unless the UNIX path does not contain any spaces.

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Answer 5

Sep 18, 2024 2:19 PM in response to volodymyrfromdnipropetrovsk

It is a UNIX path syntax and it breaks nothing in the UNIX shell (e.g. Terminal) where unescaped whitespace will force an error. The Finder allows unescaped whitespace and uses a different file path convention than UNIX has used for nearly 59 years.

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Answer 6

Oct 29, 2024 6:40 AM in response to volodymyrfromdnipropetrovsk

Same issue here with using STATA, so annoying having to delete the apostrophes every time... Didn't do this with the last MacOS

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Answer 7

Sep 18, 2024 9:14 AM in response to volodymyrfromdnipropetrovsk

Hey but isn't this a good thing so the user does not have to escape whitespace after Option-copying the file in Finder and pasting it to the Terminal?

exiftool -a -G1 -s -api QuickTimeUTC=1 -FileCreateDate -Time:All '/Users/matti/Desktop/a/a b c d.jpg'

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