aws s3 cli is great! You can easily move your local files to your aws s3 buckets. However, sometimes it is not that easy to do simple tasks - like copy files where there is a whitespace in the file name, delete all versions of all files in a versioned s3 bucket and the difference between aws s3 sync and aws s3 cp –recursive . escape the whitespace in your file name When you have a long list of files that you need to upload to s3 bucket, it will be easy for you to loop it through if you have nice filenames that there are no whitespace.