you might find it informative to do "man xargs".

xargs is a core unix tool used to accomplish exactly what you are talking about, namely to take a list of data (command arguments) from a file and execute a certain command repeatedly. so in this case, for example, if you had a list of directory names in a file, one per line, you could use xargs to execute the mkdir command once for each line in the file.

You can try this: if you have a list of names of new directories that you want to create--e.g., call it "list":

cat list | xargs mkdir -vp

xargs will take the lines from its input [the output from cat], combine them into a single line and pass that line as additional arguments to the command specied as xargs' 1st argument--in this case, "mkdir -vp". If the resulting line would be too long [there IS an upper limit on the length of your argument string], xargs will invoke the command multiple times with segments of the list that "fit".

As kircmc mentioned, be sure that the folder names in the list contain no spaces, or are enclosed in quotes, else you'll get one folder per word on the line.

See the mkdir man page for info on the 'v' and 'p' options. Also, see the xargs man page for more info.

it is possible to create multiple folders from a list in a file, you will just need to use an additional UNIX command, xargs. for example:
% cat file_names
folder1
folder2
folder3
%cat file_names | xargs -i mkdir \{\}
% ls | grep folder
folder1
folder2
folder3
%
Note, this was tested on Solaris (don't have access to a mac right now), so the syntax might be slightly different. i'm not sure if the -i is necessary or not. also, i use tcsh, so the backslashes (\) escape the shell for the curly brackets ({}). depending on what shell you use, you may or may not need these.

Another unix method of createing multiple folder is as follows:

% mkdir long_folder_name_{00,01,02,03,04,05,06}

this will creat the seven folders long_folder_name_ and ending in the expansion of the numbers in the array.

Most (all?) of the suggestions here require the directory names not to have spaces. The following command creates directory names with spaces. It requires that the directory names are listed in the file "list", one per line:

awk '{system("mkdir \"" $0 "\"")}' list

Have fun.

Sorry, in the previous post some crucial backslashes vanished as a consequence of the html coding. Here I'll try again:

awk '{system("mkdir \"" $0 "\"")}' list

Ah, but what if they have Double Quotes or Single Quotes in their names? How would one deal with that?

perl -n -e 'mkdir($_);' < folders.txt

and _that's_ why I love perl.

   perl -ne 'chomp($x=$_); mkdir($x);' < dirnames.txt

perl -lne 'mkdir $_' dirnames.txt

Doesn't do a thing for me. Not even an error.

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osxpounder

I was referring to the first perl command, when I said it did nothing for me, but I'll add that the second perl command also did nothing. If I just run "perl" on the command line, I see a process in Activity Monitor, so it's not that I lack perl.

So far, the only commands in this thread that have worked for me are those of the original post, and then the xargs suggestion immediately following.

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osxpounder

Then something's fishy: I made a text file "dirnames.txt" in my home directory with the contents

one
two
three

and then executed the above command in the same directory:

perl -ne 'chomp($x=$_); mkdir($x);' < dirnames.txt

Bingo: three folders, appropriately named.

Cheers,
Paul

This one did nothing but gave me an error: "Wilson Mug-Base.jpg: File name too long" Hmm. Is that because the file name had a space in it? I thought the point of the awk trick was that it would work with items that had spaces in their names.

BTW, that's the last item in the list, the Wilson photo.

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osxpounder

The "for" command is very nice for this:

for item in `cat your_list.txt`; do mkdir /path/to/location/$item; done

No text reformatting required.

-systemsboy

The "for" command is very nice for this:

for item in `cat your_list.txt`; do mkdir /path/to/location/$item; done

No text reformatting required.

This also fails for me. I get the error:

mkdir: your_list.txt: File exists

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osxpounder

[ Reply to This | # ]

    mkdir `jot -w Folder%02d_of_10 10`

$ cat folders.txt | sed 's/ /\\ /g' | xargs mkdir

What criteria is used to determine which Unix commands are worthy to be posted as hints here?

$ sed 's/ /\\ /g' folders.txt | xargs mkdir

Well, dangit, it didn't work for me. Maybe I goofed, but here's what I did:

Created a plain text document in TextEdit, saved as plain text, UTF-8.

In the same folder, I opened a Terminal, and used pico to create a text file that contained your script. I changed the name of the list.txt file to match mine.

Saved out of pico to a file called "do". I chmoded "do" 0700.

Then I typed:

./do

Nothing happened. No errors, no new folders.

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osxpounder

Do is a reserved word in bash. See the reserved words section in the bash man page. If you change the script name to anything else that's not a reserved bash word, it works.

herbie's contents:

cat list.txt | while read FILE

do

mkdir "${FILE}"

done

I'm using bash.

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osxpounder

[ Reply to This | # ]

Both uses of "cat file | ..." in this thread are "useless use of cat". Google for that for details. In other words, sloppy coding, time to learn to clean up your messes.

-- AppleScript wrapper to execute UNIX shell scripts with a drag and drop interface.
-- Found basic script at http://MacOSXHints.com
-- Modified to Create directories from a list stored one per line in a file dropped on the script
-- script should handle spaces in name, apostrophes in names, etc...
-- Bob Harris	25-Apr-2006

on open filelist
	repeat with dir in filelist
		do shell script ¬
			"while read dir;do mdir -p \"$dir\";done <" & quoted form of POSIX path of dir
	end repeat
end open

Bob: your kind offer of an Applescript was appreciated. It didn't compile for me, though. It breaks at the $ sign, saying "Syntax error Expected end of line but found unknown token".

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osxpounder

I thought I found a typo or two, so I changed Bob's script a bit, but still no results. I changed the quotes around $dir to single quotes, and that allowed the script to compile, but it did nothing. I saved it as an app and dropped a plain text file, with names, one per line, on it.

I changed "mdir" to "mkdir", but that made no difference, either.

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osxpounder

This is my 3rd attempt at getting this Applescript posted cleanly. First I lost the < because it looked like the start of an html tag. The 2nd time I lost the \'s and messed up the mkdir spelling. This time I'm just going to use Plain Old Text, and the heck with indentation and hope that line wrapping doesn't happen


-- AppleScript wrapper to execute UNIX shell scripts with a drag and drop interface.
-- Found basic script at http://MacOSXHints.com
-- Modified to Create directories from a list stored one per line in a file dropped on the script
-- script should handle spaces in name, apostrophes in names, etc...
-- Bob Harris 25-Apr-2006

on open filelist
repeat with afile in filelist
do shell script "while read DIR;do mkdir -p \"$DIR\";done <" & quoted form of POSIX path of afile
end repeat
end open

• takes a list of directory (folder) names from a file, one per line
• doesn't require any special escaping (no need for quotes)
• doesn't have any problems with unicode

python -c 'import sys,os,codecs;[os.mkdir(d) for d in codecs.open(sys.argv[1],"r","macroman")]' names.txt

python -c 'import sys,os,codecs;[os.mkdir(d) for d in codecs.open(sys.argv[1],"r","utf8")]' names.txt

j.

[ Reply to This | # ]

python -c 'import sys,os;[os.mkdir(d) for d in open(sys.argv[1])]' names.txt

Okay, I win the award for replies to self. :-)

TextEdit -> Preferences -> Open and Save -> Plain text file encoding.

I had both opening/saving set to Automatic. Setting to UTF-8 does the right thing.

j.

perl -ple 'mkdir($_)' names.txt

what, no ruby solution? ;-)