GaijinPunch has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

This is driving me nuts. Let's say I have this string: 
my $directory = "/home/user/files/personal/addresses";

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I need to make that directory tree on another machine. I've played around with all kinds of stuff, and I can easily pop off the file name. But I'm getting stuck b/c you can't just say... 
mkdir /home/user/file/personal

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...and expect it to make it unless the previous directory is there. Not w/ unix anyway. If I knew the subdirectories would only go 3-4 layers deep, it wouldn't be a problem, but they could go on forever, so I need a more dynamic solution than what I've come up with. So, I'm hoping there's a module, or just something I'm missing that could help out. I found Find::File which made my life easier in gathering that info. Now I'm looking for a simpler way out of writing the directories.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
•Re: Help making a directory tree
by merlyn (Sage) on Aug 26, 2003 at 07:50 UTC
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[d/l]
      Or I could always go w/ Merlyn's solution. Quite brilliant. Thanks!
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Re: Help making a directory tree
by wirrwarr (Monk) on Aug 26, 2003 at 08:09 UTC
    Just one off-topic note about unix's mkdir:
    At least the versions i'm using (GNU mkdir) support the "-p" flag to create missing parent directories.

    daniel.
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      wirrwarr: That's definitely worth noting - I didn't know that. Unfortunately, the source is GNU friendly, and the target is Solaris. :(
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Re: Help making a directory tree
by sgifford (Prior) on Aug 26, 2003 at 07:30 UTC
    I'm pretty sure there's a module to do this, but until somebody points it out you can try something like this: 
    #!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

mkdir_p($ARGV[0]);

sub mkdir_p
{
  my($d)=@_;

  my $dirsofar = "";
  foreach my $dc (split(/\//,$d))
  {
    next unless ($dc);
    $dirsofar .= "/".$dc;
    if (!mkdir($dirsofar))
    {
      if ($! !~ /exists/i)
      {
        die "Couldn't mkdir($dirsofar): $!";
      }
    }
  }
}

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[reply]
[d/l]
      Thanks for the reply. One kicker here though. Your code stops when it can't make the first directory (/home in this case). Complains that the folder exists, which it will in most cases. I tried changing this: 
      $dirsofar .= "/".$dc;

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      to this: 
      $dirsofar = ( $dirsofar =~ /^./ ) ? $dirsofar . "/".$dc : $dirsofar .=
+ $dc;

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      In order to make directories only from the current directory. IE - if running the script from /home/user --- make the other two directories. But in that case if: 
      @ARGV[0] = "/home/user/files/work/file";

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      My directories would turn out to be: 
      /home/useruser/filesfilesfiles/workworkworkwork

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      Another 20 minutes and I should be able to to tweak your guy... I gotta bolt in a minute though. :(
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[d/l]
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        Merlyn's solution is better, but the directory already existing is why it checks the error message: 
              if ($! !~ /exists/i)
      {
        die "Couldn't mkdir($dirsofar): $!";
      }

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        As long as the error message contains the word "exists", it will just ignore the error and continue on. I tested this case, and it worked fine for me. If it doesn't work for you, I'm curious what error message it prints...
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[d/l]

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