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unixsedmkdir

manipulating a string to create directories in unix

I want to take a word as input and creating consecutive directories using the letters of this word in unix shell. I tried sed, awk and fold commands but did not obtaiın any useful result. Any advice?

For example: If input is hello, it should create h/e/l/l/o directories as one inside another. In other words, h will be the top directory and o will be the deepest subdirectory.

Solution

  • This should do the trick in any Bourne compatible shell:

    $ mkdir -p $(echo foobar | sed 's:\(.\):\1/:g')
$ find f
f
f/o
f/o/o
f/o/o/b
f/o/o/b/a
f/o/o/b/a/r

    Note that \1 is a backreference to the text matched by the first pair of \(...\). Note also that the expansion result is mkdir -p f/o/o/b/a/r/ -- but mkdir ignores the trailing slash to our advantage.