I noticed that it is more than a year since the last post, so I thought that a small new content would have been easier to write.
This in particular refers to an extension I wrote some time ago for the mkdir
system call to make it a bit more proactive π.
90% of the times, I use mkdir
to create a new folder in the current directory, so the few times I want to create a new folder in a deeper path I always forget to add the --parent
flag.
me/blog $ mkdir foo/bin/bar
mkdir: cannot create directory βfoo/bin/barβ: No such file or directory
as the Man-pages would tell you, since the parent directory foo/bin
does not exist, mkdir
fails to create bar
, but what if mkdir
were so kind to tell me just that, and suggests to add the flag on my behalf? π
This is actually somehow easy.
First of all, you need a way to define new functions in your shell. I use zsh, but in bash would be the same: write a function definition in a file and source it in .bashrc or .zshrc.
This comes from my .zshrc
#
# Functions and aliases
#
source ~/.dot/.config/cconf/zsh/functions.zsh
What to do for mkdir
?
- override it with a custom function β‘οΈ
function mkdir() {}
- find the parent directory
mkdir
expects to exist already β‘οΈecho $1 | grep -E -q '[\S+/]+'
- if it doesn't exist, ask if it must be created or not β‘οΈ
echo "Press ENTER to run mkdir with --parents."
Ok, point 2 probably requires some explaination, so let's back to the example above
me/blog $ mkdir foo/bin/bar
bar
is the folder to be created, while foo/bin/
is the parent.
The grep
expression above looks for any sequence of substrings ending with slash /
: foo/
, foo/bar/
, etc., but not bar
, or foo
, which would be a directory in the current folder.
So putting all these pieces together:
function mkdir() {
# extend mkdir with custom features
# propose adding "--parents" flag.
echo $1 | grep -E -q '[\S+/]+'
if [[ $? == 0 && ! -d $1 ]]; then
# one of the directories in $1 path do not exist
# suggest adding "--parents" flag.
echo "# Some parents in $1 do not exist. Press ENTER to run mkdir with --parents."
read
command mkdir --parents $@
echo "# done"
else
command mkdir $@
fi
}
Let's try again
me/blog $ mkdir foo/bin/bar
# Some parents in foo/bin/bar do not exist. Press ENTER to run mkdir with --parents.
# done
me/blog $ tree | grep -e foo -e bar -e bin
βββ foo
β βββ bin
β βββ bar
Of course in a similar manner you can override rm
as well (see here).
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