Unix - create path of folders and file

Question

I know you can do mkdir to create a directory and touch to create a file, but is there no way to do both operations in one go?

i.e. if I wa

Answer 1

This is what I would do:

mkdir -p /my/other/path/here && touch $_/cpredthing.txt

Here, the $_ is a variable that represents the last argument to the previous command that we executed in line.

As always if you want to see what the output might be, you can test it by using the echo command, like so:

echo mkdir -p /code/temp/other/path/here && echo touch $_/cpredthing.txt

Which outputs as:

mkdir -p /code/temp/other/path/here
touch /code/temp/other/path/here/cpredthing.txt

As a bonus, you could write multiple files at once using brace expansion, for example:

mkdir -p /code/temp/other/path/here &&
touch $_/{cpredthing.txt,anotherfile,somescript.sh}

Again, totally testable with echo:

mkdir -p /code/temp/other/path/here
touch /code/temp/other/path/here/cpredthing.txt /code/temp/other/path/here/anotherfile /code/temp/other/path/here/somescript.sh