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I am writing a shell script to run under the KornShell (ksh) on AIX. I would like to use the
mkdir
command to create a directory. But the directory may already exist, in which case I do not want to do anything. So I want to either test to see that the directory does not exist, or suppress the "File exists" error that
mkdir
throws when it tries to create an existing directory.
How can I best do this?
Note that this will also create any intermediate directories that don't exist; for instance,
mkdir -p foo/bar/baz
will create directories foo, foo/bar, and foo/bar/baz if they don't exist.
Some implementation like GNU mkdir include mkdir --parents as a more readable alias, but this is not specified in POSIX/Single Unix Specification and not available on many common platforms like macOS, various BSDs, and various commercial Unixes, so it should be avoided.
If you want an error when parent directories don't exist, and want to create the directory if it doesn't exist, then you can test for the existence of the directory first:
[ -d foo ] || mkdir foo
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mkdir $dir
elif [[ ! -d $dir ]]; then
echo "$dir already exists but is not a directory" 1>&2
which will create the directory if it doesn't exist, but warn you if the name of the directory you're trying to create is already in use by something other than a directory.
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mkdir foo works even if the directory exists.
To make it work only if the directory named "foo" does not exist, try using the -p flag.
Example:
mkdir -p foo
This will create the directory named "foo" only if it does not exist. :)
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You can either use an if statement to check if the directory exists or not. If it does not exits, then create the directory.
dir=/home/dir_name
if [ ! -d $dir ]
mkdir $dir
echo "Directory exists"
You can directory use mkdir with -p option to create a directory. It will check if the directory is not available it will.
mkdir -p $dir
mkdir -p also allows to create the tree structure of the directory. If you want to create the parent and child directories using same command, can opt mkdir -p
mkdir -p /home/parent_dir /home/parent_dir/child1 /home/parent_dir/child2
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This is a simple function (Bash shell) which lets you create a directory if it doesn't exist.
#------------------------------------------#
# Create a directory if it does not exist. #
#------------------------------------------#
# Note the "-p" option in the mkdir #
# command which creates directories #
# recursively. #
#------------------------------------------#
createDirectory() {
mkdir -p -- "$1"
You can call the above function as:
createDirectory "$(mktemp -d dir-example.XXXXX)/fooDir/BarDir"
The above creates fooDir and BarDir if they don't exist. Note the "-p" option in the mkdir command which creates directories recursively.
which will create all directories in a given path, if exists throws no error otherwise it creates all directories from left to right in the given path. Try the below command. the directories newdir and anotherdir doesn't exists before issuing this command
Correct Usage
mkdir -p /tmp/newdir/anotherdir
After executing the command you can see newdir and anotherdir created under /tmp. You can issue this command as many times you want, the command always have exit(0). Due to this reason most people use this command in shell scripts before using those actual paths.
Improvement on the 'classic' solution (by Brian Campbell) - to handle the case of symlink to a directory.
[ -d foo/. ] || mkdir foo
if [ !-d $dirName ];then
if ! mkdir $dirName; then # Shorter version. Shell will complain if you put braces here though
echo "Can't make dir: $dirName"
