How do I create a directory and parent directories in one Perl command?

Question

In Perl, how can I create a subdirectory and, at the same time, create parent directories if they do not exist? Like UNIX's mkdir -p command?

Answer 1

use File::Path qw(make_path);
make_path("path/to/sub/directory");

The deprecated mkpath and preferred make_path stemmed from a discussion in Perl 5 Porters thread that's archived here.

In a nutshell, Perl 5.10 testing turned up awkwardness in the argument parsing of the makepath() interface. So it was replaced with a simpler version that took a hash as the final argument to set options for the function.

Answer 2

Use mkpath from the File::Path module:

use File::Path qw(mkpath);
mkpath("path/to/sub/directory");

Answer 3

Kindly ignore if you are looking for a Perl module with 'mkdir -p' functionality but the following code would work:

my $dir = '/root/example/dir';

system ("mkdir -p $dir 2> /dev/null") == 0 
    or die "failed to create $dir. exiting...\n";

You can use a module but then you have to install it on each server you are going to port your code on. I usually prefer to use system function for a work like mkdir because it's a lesser overhead to import and call a module when I need it only once to create a directory.

Answer 4

ref http://perldoc.perl.org/File/Path.html

"The make_path function creates the given directories if they don't exists [sic!] before, much like the Unix command mkdir -p"

Answer 5

mkdir() allows you to create directories in your Perl script.

Example:

use strict;
use warnings;

my $directory = "tmp";

unless(mkdir($directory, 0755)) {
        die "Unable to create $directory\n";

This program create a directory called "tmp" with permissions set to 0755 (only the owner has the permission to write to the directory; group members and others can only view files and list the directory contents).