dealing with spaces (" ") in image names

[AndrewS]

I have a set of .fit files with a space (" ") instead of a hyphen ("-") or underscore ("_") separting the components, eg:

first second1.fit
first second2.fit
first second3.fit
etc.

I want to rename them with a connecting character (such as hyphen), eg:

first-second1.fit
first-second2.fit
first-second3.fit
etc.

so step one is list all the files into a text file, say original.txt and then create a second textfile with the spaces replaced by hyphen, call that altered.txt - this much can be done with translit...finally I want to use imcopy to rename them:

[fitz]

Spaces aren't legal in IRAF filenames, even if you quote or escape them in many cases. Simplest thing is to deal with this outside of IRAF entirely, e.g.