shell - Linux rename using parameters and spaces?

Is it possible, in Linux, to rename a file from something without spaces to something containing spaces?

I know I can create directories and files with spaces by doing:
mkdir "new dir" and:
touch "new file.txt"

I want to rename files from:
imgp0882.jpg to something like:
20091231 1243 some topic.jpg

And how would it look in a shell script that uses parameters like:
for i in *.jpg do
rename "$i" "$somepath/$mydate $mytime $mytopic$extension"
?

A little background:

• I'm new to Linux (using PCLinuxOS 2009.2), coming from Windows, and I've written myself a little shell script to download files from my camera and then automatically rename them according to a date-and-topic pattern. As you can guess by now, I'm stuck on the bit about renaming.


• If you want to see my script, here's a copy.


• I'm not using jhead for this renaming because that only works with JPEG files but I want a single solution for any media format including videos.

Answer

Maybe you need to just put quotes around whole destination path? E.g.

$ touch test
$ a=one
$ b=two
$ mv "test" "$a $b"
$ ls -la
total 8
-rw-r--r--  1 whitequark whitequark    0 2010-01-27 01:21  
-rw-r--r--  1 whitequark whitequark    0 2010-01-27 01:20   
drwxr-xr-x  2 whitequark whitequark 4096 2010-01-27 01:21 .
drwxr-xr-x 80 whitequark whitequark 4096 2010-01-27 01:16 ..
-rw-r--r--  1 whitequark whitequark    0 2010-01-27 01:21 one two