How do I make multiple directories at once in a directory?

I know with mkdir I can do mkdir A B C D E F to create each directory. How do I create directories A-Z or 1-100 with out typing in each letter or number?

Answers:

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Method 1

The {} syntax is Bash syntax not tied to the for construct.

mkdir {A..Z}

is sufficient all by itself.

http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bashref.html#Brace-Expansion

Method 2

It’s probably easiest to just use a for loop:

for char in {A..Z}; do
    mkdir $char
done

for num in {1..100}; do
    mkdir $num
done

You need at least bash 3.0 though; otherwise you have to use something like seq

Method 3

You can also do more complex combinations (try these with echo instead of mkdir so there’s no cleanup afterwards):

Compare

$ echo pre-{{F..G},{3..4},{m..n}}-post
pre-F-post pre-G-post pre-3-post pre-4-post pre-m-post pre-n-post

to

$ echo pre-{F..G}{3..4}{m..n}-post
pre-F3m-post pre-F3n-post pre-F4m-post pre-F4n-post pre-G3m-post pre-G3n-post
pre-G4m-post pre-G4n-post

If you have Bash 4, try

$ echo file{0001..10}
file0001 file0002 file0003 file0004 file0005 file0006 file0007 file0008 file0009
file0010

and

$ echo file{0001..10..2}
file0001 file0003 file0005 file0007 file0009

Method 4

On Linux you can generate sequences of digits with the “seq” command, but this doesn’t exist on all Unix systems. For example to generate directories from 1 to 100:

mkdir `seq 1 100`

While you can certainly make directories A to Z with shell utils:

seq 65 90 
    | while read foo; do printf "%bn" `printf '\\x%xn' $foo`; done 
    | xargs mkdir

It’s probably a lot less ugly to just use Perl:

perl -e 'foreach (ord "A"..ord "Z") { mkdir chr $_ }'

Method 5

YAA ( Yet Another Answer 😉

Under bash, there is a lot of thing you can do! Simple sample:

mkdir -p /tmp/mkdirdemo/1stLev_{R..T}{0..2}/2ndL_{one,two,three}_{a..c}{a..z}/3rd_{30..42}

This will create 9 directories, with 2106 subdirectories and 27378 third level subdirs.

ls -d /tmp/mkdirdemo/1stLev_*/*/*|wc -l
27378
find /tmp/mkdirdemo -mindepth 3 -type d | wc -l
27378

$ find /tmp/mkdirdemo -mindepth 3 -type d|sort|sed -ne '1,2p;27377,$p;3s/.*/.../p'
/tmp/mkdirdemo/1stLev_R0/2ndL_one_aa/3rd_30
/tmp/mkdirdemo/1stLev_R0/2ndL_one_aa/3rd_31
...
/tmp/mkdirdemo/1stLev_T2/2ndL_two_cz/3rd_41
/tmp/mkdirdemo/1stLev_T2/2ndL_two_cz/3rd_42

Method 6

mkdir direct{1..3} will result in mkdir direct1 direct2 direct3 and so on . Same for {a..z}

Method 7

mkdir {A..Z}
mkdir {0..100}
mkdir test_{A..Z}
and so on.

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0