Is there a way to create multiple directories at once with mkdir?

Question

If I wanted to create multiple directories (on the same level) and then feed it a comma seperated list of directory names (or something to that effect)?

Solution 1

Short answer

mkdir takes multiple arguments, simply run

mkdir dir_1 dir_2

Solution 2

You can use lists to create directories and it can get pretty wild.

Some examples to get people thinking about it:

mkdir sa{1..50}
mkdir -p sa{1..50}/sax{1..50}
mkdir {a-z}12345 
mkdir {1,2,3}
mkdir test{01..10}
mkdir -p `date '+%y%m%d'`/{1,2,3} 
mkdir -p $USER/{1,2,3} 

1. 50 directories from sa1 through sa50
2. same but each of the directories will hold 50 times sax1 through sax50 (-p will create parent directories if they do not exist.
3. 26 directories from a12345 through z12345
4. comma separated list makes dirs 1, 2 and 3.
5. 10 directories from test01 through test10.
6. same as 4 but with the current date as a directory and 1,2,3 in it.
7. same as 4 but with the current user as a directory and 1,2,3 in it.

So, if I understood it correctly and you want to create some directories, and within them new directories, then you could do this:

mkdir -p sa{1..10}/{1,2,3}

and get sa1, sa2,...,sa10 and within each dirs 1, 2 and 3.

Solution 3

It's very simple, lets you want to create a directory structure such as:

Websites/
  static/
      cs
      js
  templates/
      html and xhtml

You can do it in a single command like this:

mkdir -p Website/{static/{cs,js},templates/html\ and\ xhtml}

Be careful to escape the spaces in your directory names.

Solution 4

Make a list of the names for your desired directories using line breaks instead of commas as a separator. Save that list.

mkdir `cat list`

You should now have all the directories named in your list.

Solution 5

Something like this? (thanks to muru for the printf tip)

printf '%s' 'foo,bar,baz' | xargs -d, mkdir

$ ls
$ printf '%s' 'foo,bar,baz' | xargs -d, mkdir
$ ls
bar  baz  foo
$ 

You can wrap it into a function for ease of use:

function mkdir_cs {
    printf '%s' "$1" | xargs -d, mkdir
}

$ ls
$ mkdir_cs 'foo,bar,baz'
$ ls
bar  baz  foo
$ 

View more solutions

Comments

[Sparhawk]

man mkdir....

[David Richerby]

Any time you want to know if a command can do some thing you want done, type man followed by the name of the command.

[Jacob Vlijm]

@DavidRicherby although man mkdir "kind of" suggests the possibility to create multiple directories at once, it is not mentioned specifically, nor how to do that.

[David Richerby]

@JacobVlijm The GNU coreutils 8.21 manpage for mkdir says, "NAME mkdir - make directories // SYNOPSIS mkdir [OPTION]... [DIRECTORY]... // DESCRIPTION Create the DIRECTORY(ies) if they do not already exist." That seems pretty clear that you can make more than one directory.

[Jacob Vlijm]

@DavidRicherby like I said "suggests the possibility to create multiple directories at once, it is not mentioned specifically, nor how to do that"

[Blaisorblade]

@JacobVlijm Man pages jargon is not obvious without instruction, but in the technical language of man pages, the info is totally clear, even in the given quote. Note the ... after [DIRECTORY], meaning that argument can be repeated. So DIRECTORY(ies) refers to all passed DIRECTORY arguments. However, "RTFM" comments sometimes forget there is a notation to learn.

[muru]

Just a printf "%s" "$1" | xargs -d, mkdir should be enough.

[Slipp D. Thompson]

I agree with @gniourf_gniourf… there are no usages of regular expressions in your answer. Did you mean to say something else, or to provide a different example?

[Rinzwind]

@gniourf_gniourf done :)

[David Richerby]

I don't think the asker actually wants the list to be comma-separated; I'm pretty sure that was just their guess at what the syntax might be.

[Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy]

Yes, that will work, however , with a caveat - the directory names have to be one whole string. If one line is spaced dir , then it will create two dirs , spaced and `dir.

[Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy]

Well, OP probably didn't to exactly have comma-separated list, however it's sure may be used as a method, point being " lists can be used,too, you don't have to type out name of each dir individually". Especially that will be useful when a big list cannot be generated with ranges, like dir{1..1000}. Say , you want to make a directory per username, or per project, or per geographic location, like a city

[Jon V]

Yeah - you can't even successfully do any kind of escaping for the spaces, either - junk\ dir in the list file gives two directories, junk\ and dir. Gave me a panic when I saw a \ in a directory name.

[deed02392]

This answer depends on the shell doing expansion of your input before providing that input as arguments to mkdir. It's much more accurate to just say that mkdir can create multiple dirs with multiple arguments and then talk about how a given shell can make that easier.

[Plinth]

If I try to do something like mkdir sa$(seq 0.1 0.1 1), all it does is create one directory named sa0.1 and the rest 0.2, 0.3, ..., 1. How can I get decimal brace expansion without writing the entire list?

[runlevel0]

man 1 seq or even better info seq are your friends. This will do the job: for f in $(seq -f %g 0.2 1 10) ; do mkdir -p test/$f ; done it will create a directory test with subdirs 0,2 up to 9,2 Note that my local is Dutch, if LC_TYPE is en_US you will get the dot as decimal separator. The key is that seq accepts printf syle formatting.

[Isaac Gregson]

You can also press tab here to expand them before running the command.

[Dominic Motuka]

I think you meant mkdir {a..z}12345 not mkdir {a-z}12345

[mcw]

This can be combined with the -p flag mentioned in other answers. If so, the list file doesn't have to include parent directories as their own lines, they will be detected and made automatically.

[balaji]

Thanks you working file .....

[Manuel Jordan]

@Rinzwind just being curious, what is the difference between mkdir {1,2,3} and mkdir 1 2 3? practically both do the same, so when is mandatory the former?

[Mark Lee]

Make sure the 'list' file has no file ending. list.txt will result in the creation of the directory list.txt in the location of the file. And those are backticks, not single quotes: `cat list` not 'cat list'.