Hi, I set up this unraid about 2 years ago, on v6.9 I think. Obviously I messed up with my file naming, because now I have a lot of shares with spaces in their names.

Being a mainly Windows person, underscores and hyphens didn't look good in names.

But now I have all these orange warning texts on lots of share names.

I tried to rename Amandas Stuff to AmandasStuff, in the share details page and it didn't do anything, but later in the evening I realised that the Unraid Gui had crashed. Dockers were still working so I left it until this morning, where I tried and failed to do a reboot. I stopped all dockers before rebooting, but it was still unclean.

I know virsh is what is used to control vms, but I couldn't find a command to list running vms- is there a command like docker ps and docker stop for vms?

Sorry, off on a tangent. Should I worry about these invalid characters? Was renaming it in the share details the wrong way to try? I have 8 shered with names containing [space].

Thanks

You should be able to rename them using the GUI.

Ill try again. Yesterday I think that crashed the web ui. I tired renaming again today, but it reverts to the original name on clicking apply. Get the unraid animation and then it js just the same.

The GUI should have no issues renaming a share with space to one without, but if it crashes again, post the diagnostics and actual names used for the share, before and after.

It isn't crashing now, but the apply button seems to not do anything- no unraid wait icon, nothing.

I'll try a reboot again and try again.

Folks are using emby atm though.

I though I saw Squid say that the shares could be renamed in boot/config/shares somewhere on this forum, but it is difficult to know what works for one version and not for another. I did try that, but fortunately I backed up the folder before I did, cos it didn't work for me.

I HAVE somehow managed to rename 2 shares, both ended up getting duplicated and the wrong name wouldn't delete. I tried to delete the folders off the cache drive- the duplicated were only stored on Cache_2 and I tried to delete them. Shares were empty, but they would not delete. I did try to a few times, but then I went back to the shares and they did delete.

So I do have 2 done, but those were shares I was willing to lose, not so much some of the others.

Edited November 3, 2025Nov 3 by IanMcLeish

Whitespace/space characters in a Share or file name is not a problem to the Unraid OS. Until you drop to the command line. The BASH shell used by Unraid treats a whitespace as a deliminator separating parameters on the command line. The BASH shell can handle this situation if the backslash character (\) precedes the the whitespace character. See this example below:

The directory name is All Movies Notice that even the shell inserts the backslash character when it outputs a name with a Whitespace in it. Of course, if you have other programs/scripts that are going to be working with resources with spaces in the name at the command line level, they must be aware that the backslash character has be to inserted before the whitespace character. Let me show you an example of what I mean:

You can see the backslash character in the cd command. It is absolutely required to the command to work properly.

(I can remember that the old UNIX hands would never even use a capital letter because they did want to have to remember to use the shift key. That is way virtually all of the old UNIX commands names are lower case!)

Edited November 4, 2025Nov 4 by Frank1940

Frank1940 - I just started to change the share names because Unraid 7.2 was warning about illegal characters.

I tried to delete the duplicated shares and after some messing they did go, until I rebooted and they all came back. I have 2 shares with their correct names showing as well as their incorrect names showing, both only pointing to cache_2 for some reason. Those shares exist on the cache 2 drive and they are both empty.

I looked in the flash drive config/shares folder and only the two correct names are listed in there, but unanonymised diagnostics show both as being in the shares folder.?

Should I delete the unreal shares off of that cache drive and see what happens? I have no idea how they were gone and then arrived back after a reboot!

shares.zip

After renaming the shares, open the Shares page and click on "Clean Up." That should take care of the extra cfgs.

I tried to delete the folders, or directories in the cache_2 drive, nothing happened. Tried again to delete the unwanted empty shares. Nope. (At least things are still working GUI wise)

I did click the clean up button and it seemed to run, but it didn't remove the 2 duff shares pointing only to the cache_2 drive. ANd the button is now disabled with no change.

I'll enclose the full diagnostics, but I think I should just wait and see if a newer version of Unraid fixes this issue? Everything is working, I just have unwanted unnessesary shares. Not a huge deal!

unraidnas-diagnostics-20251104-1814.zip

Edited November 4, 2025Nov 4 by IanMcLeish

Post a directory listing showing an example of repeated folders. ls -l /mnt/path/to/example

root@UnraidNAS:~# ls -l /mnt/cache2_ssd

total 806338

drwxrwxrwx 2 nobody users 2 Nov 4 09:50 Amandas\ Stuff/

drwxrwxrwx 2 nobody users 2 Nov 4 08:42 Dad\ Photos/

drwxrwxrwx 2 nobody users 6 Nov 5 04:40 syslog/

-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 824975436 Mar 3 2025 unraidnas-v7.0.0-flash-backup-20250303-0906.zip*

root@UnraidNAS:~# ls -l /mnt/user0

total 133

drwxrwxrwx 1 nobody users 2 Aug 13 15:08 AmandasStuff/

drwxrwxrwx 1 nobody users 4 Jan 31 2025 Backups/

drwxrwxrwx 1 nobody users 3 Apr 30 2025 Dad-Photos/

drwxrwxrwx 1 nobody users 3 Aug 6 20:22 Documents/

drwxrwxrwx 1 nobody users 18 Jul 13 08:24 Downloads/

drwxrwxrwx 1 nobody users 2 May 12 15:15 Downloads\ from\ PC/

drwxrwxrwx 1 nobody users 6 Jul 20 08:55 Drone\ Videos/

drwxrwxrwx 1 nobody users 3 May 8 17:51 Drone\ Videos\ -\ Remote\ Controllers/

drwxrwxrwx 1 nobody users 4 Feb 25 2025 Dropbox_Download/

drwxrwxrwx+ 1 nobody users 3 Feb 25 2025 Hard\ Drive\ Images/

drwxrwxrwx 1 nobody users 112 Feb 25 2025 Home\ Videos/

drwxrwxrwx 1 nobody users 3 Aug 9 11:10 Immich_Photos/

drwxrwxrwx 1 nobody users 4 Sep 9 17:13 Paperless/

drwxrwxrwx 1 nobody users 4 Feb 25 2025 Raspberry\ Pi/

drwxrwxrwx 1 nobody users 5 Oct 29 20:42 UrBackups/

drwxrwxrwx 1 nobody users 17 Aug 17 12:18 dash-cam/

drwxrwxrwx 1 nobody users 6 Aug 11 03:17 data/

drwxrwxrwx 1 nobody users 17 Nov 1 17:29 isos/

drwxrwxrwx 1 nobody users 4 Apr 30 2025 photos/

drwxrwxrwx 1 nobody users 3 Jul 13 2024 roms/

drwxrwxrwx 1 nobody users 7 Nov 5 08:36 syslog/

root@UnraidNAS:~#

The 2 files on the ssd cache wont delete. Unraid sees the shares as empty but doesn't delete them.

Is this the information you wanted?

Edited November 5, 2025Nov 5 by IanMcLeish

31 minutes ago, IanMcLeish said:

The 2 files on the ssd cache wont delete.

They are datasets, if they are empty, try

zfs destroy cache2_ssd/Amandas\ Stuff

zfs destroy cache2_ssd/Dad\ Photos

8 hours ago, JorgeB said:

They are datasets, if they are empty, try

zfs destroy cache2_ssd/Amandas\ Stuff

zfs destroy cache2_ssd/Dad\ Photos

JorgeB, thanks for all the suggestions. I did try those commands at lunchtime, but nothing changed, but although the gui seemed responsive, once again buttons were not doing what they were supposed to - after an unclean shutdown, I was running a parity check. Although the parity check seemed to be running- equal reads from all array drives (all dockers and vms were off) the parity check seemed to stop at 7.1% all afternoon. I tried to pause, no effect. I tried to cancel, no effect. Although the gui was not giving a 500 server error, it wasn't doing what I thought is should do. Had to hit the blue poweroff button eventually. I shall leave this issue until I have a parity check successfully completed. WHther it is connected I don't know but the unraid api had to be restarted as well.

I didn't make those data sets, but I guess they are doing no harm for the moment, so I'll sit tight where I am and ignore them, cos I seem to be causing more harm than good with my attempts at deleting the "shares" or datasets, and I have had a couple of unclean shutdowns from problems since 7.2, so I reckon a successful parity check is number 1 on the list.

I will try again and report back, but it seems share renames do not work for me at this moment.

Thanks again!

4 minutes ago, IanMcLeish said:

I did try those commands at lunchtime, but nothing changed,

Please post the output from the commands.

Sorry JorgeB, I was hesitant to re-run these commands as last time all I saw was the unraid wait icon and nothing happened. Against my better judgement, and a fter a reboot I did run them and there was no output, but no wait icon either- the "ghost shares" have gone!

Thanks for your help. I will try to rename the other folders when the parity check has completed.

Am I correct in thinking that you knew those "folders" were datasets because the had a 2 instead of a 1 after them? Just so I know in future?

Thanks for your help.

I tried to rename another folder from the shares tab. The ui is now not loading and anything I can see is not updating - the only screen that isn't loading, should I say trying to load at this time is the dashboard, and it has frozen.

Is there any other way to try to rename shares other than in the shares tab, cos that seems to brick my server every time?

I don't know if the parity check is still running or not, but all drives still seem active, I cannot load terminal - blank page.

It is 7.05pm, but the time says 16.58 on the unraid main page. I can't believe I am the only person with this issue!

Edit- I had to do another command line shutdown, which was once again unsafe. I love computers and I used to love troubleshooting them (Win 95 and Alta Vista), but like cars, as they became more complicated, and I get older, I just wish they would work.

Why is unraid complaining about the names of these shares when they never, ever did before - I wouldn't have called them that had I been warned before, but like Frank said, soes it matter??

Edited November 6, 2025Nov 6 by IanMcLeish
Another unsafe shutdown

If it happens again please grab the diagnostics to see if there's something logged.

@JorgeB will this affect the containers that has mapped to it or it will automatically update the mapped share? Sorry my English is bad.

25 minutes ago, HHUBS said:

will this affect the containers that has mapped to it or it will automatically update the mapped share?

Containers are not automatically remapped; if you delete or change mapped folders, you will need to reconfigure them in the containers.