[mpg123-users] mpg123 playlist with spaces not working

[Will S. <wil...@uw...>]

I´m trying to make a playlist for mpg123 from a directory containing 
subdirectories. Many of the subdirs and filenames contain spaces. This 
is using a Raspberry Pi with Raspbian Bullseye, mpg123 1.26.4.

I made a playlist where each line is an absolute path enclosed in 
¨double quotes¨.  mpg123 seems to stop reading the line at the 1st 
space, and it tells me the file (not really the file, the truncated 
string) doesn't exist. Whereas, mpg123 does just fine with a single 
filespec like this: mpg123 "home/me/path to file/a music file.mp3"  (The 
lines in the playlist were like that.)

I tried escaping all the spaces with backslashes, eg /home/me/path\ to\ 
file/a\ music\ file.mp3. mpg123 tells me it can play the file, and it 
shows me the string it can't play, except all the backslashes have been 
changed to forward slashes, ie /home/me/path/ to/ file/a/ music/ 
file.mp3. I´m not much of a bash expert, but in my thrashing around, I 
got the idea of escaping the spaces with TWO backslashes. mpg123 
replaced each \\  with //.

It does fine with cat /home/me/path\ to\ file/a\ music\ file.mp3 | 
mpg123 -   Not surprising.

I tried putting #M3U as the 1st line of the playlist. That was 
interesting. It skipped over the 1st file with an error message. The 
directory name had 2 spaces and the filename had 1 space. It played the 
2nd file - in that case, the path had no spaces until the filename, 
which contained 1 space.

I can probably figure out how to write a bash script to change all the 
directory and file names to remove the spaces But it seems like there 
must be a way to pass paths full of spaces to mpg123.