Use of --parents flag in mkdir and cp

Occasionally, you want to create a directory structure several levels deep.
For example, /home/peter/status/2007/november.

Your first attempt may be something like this:

$ mkdir /home/peter/status/2007/november
mkdir: cannot create directory `/home/peter/status/2007/november': 
No such file or directory

The problem is that the intermediate directories (status and 2007) do not exist.

The following will work, but it is quite clumsy.

$ cd /home/peter; mkdir status
$ cd status; mkdir 2007
$ cd 2007; mkdir november

A much shorter way is simply:

$ mkdir --parents /home/peter/status/2007/november

With the --parents option, mkdir will actually create the intermediate parent directories if needed.

-p is the short equivalent of --parent for the mkdir command.

When the time comes to create the december directory, you can issue this:

$ mkdir -p /home/peter/status/2007/december

Although you have specified the -p (--parents) option, and the parent
directory structure already exists, it will quietly create the december
directory below it. This is just what we expect.


To check your results, do a ls -R (recursively list the directory)

$ cd /home/peter; ls -R status
status:
2007

status/2007:
december  november

status/2007/december:

status/2007/november:

Let's create a file in /home/peter/status/2007/november.

 $ touch /home/peter/status/2007/november/nov12.txt

The above will create an empty file named nov12.txt.

Next, we will copy the nov12.txt file like this:

$ cd /home/peter
$ cp --parents status/2007/november/nov12.txt /home/peter/tmp

The --parents flag will cause the full path to be copied to tmp ("status/2007/november/nov12.txt")

$ cd /home/peter/tmp/
$ ls -R status
status:
2007

status/2007:
november

status/2007/november:
nov12.txt

How is cp --parents different from cp -r (recursive copy)?

$ cd /home/peter
$ cp -r status /home/peter/tmp

The recursive copy will have copied everything under status (including the contents of the december directory).

ls -R /home/peter/tmp/status
/home/peter/tmp/status:
2007

/home/peter/tmp/status/2007:
december  november

/home/peter/tmp/status/2007/december:

/home/peter/tmp/status/2007/november:
nov12.txt