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

Use && to combine two commands in one shell line:

COMMAND1 && COMMAND2
mkdir -p /my/other/path/here/ && touch /my/other/path/here/cpedthing.txt

Note: Previously I recommended usage of ; to separate the two commands but as pointed out by @trysis it's probably better to use && in most situations because in case COMMAND1 fails COMMAND2 won't be executed either. (Otherwise this might lead to issues you might not have been expecting.)

Answer 2

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

Answer 3

Do it with /usr/bin/install:

install -D /my/long/path/here/thing.txt /my/other/path/here/cpedthing.txt

when you don't have a source file:

install -D <(echo 1) /my/other/path/here/cpedthing.txt

Answer 4

if [ ! -d /my/other ]
then
   mkdir /my/other/path/here
   cp /my/long/path/here/thing.txt /my/other/path/here/cpedthing.txt
fi

Answer 5

#!/bin/sh
for f in "$@"; do mkdir -p "$(dirname "$f")"; done
touch "$@"

Answer 6

you can do it in two steps:

mkdir -p /my/other/path/here/
touch /my/other/path/here/cpedthing.txt