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jdavidb (1361)

jdavidb
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http://voiceofjohn.blogspot.com/
J. David Blackstone has a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Engineering and nine years of experience at a wireless telecommunications company, where he learned Perl and never looked back. J. David has an advantage in that he works really hard, he has a passion for writing good software, and he knows many of the world's best Perl programmers.

Journal of jdavidb (1361)

Tuesday July 20, 2004
12:15 PM

mkdir -p in Perl

[ #19954 ]

The equivalent of mkdir -p in Perl is:

use File::Path qw(mkpath);
mkpath $directory;


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  • On that note, I submit that File::Path is misnamed. The summary of the module is given as "create or remove directory trees." In other words, it's mkdir -p and rm -rf in Perl.

    Convenient to have, hard to find.

    --
    J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
    • It is a very useful module. However, the naming is a bit screwy. If it's called File::Path, why does it have mkpath() and rmtree(). Surely it should be rmpath() in that case?

      Anyway, it's another handy core module that people don't notice because of the name, sigh.

  • You left off a bit:
    ... or die "mkpath: Boom!";
    • Actually you most often don't care whether you could create the directory structure, you care whether it's there after the call. So it's:

      mkpath($directory);
      -d $directory or die("Could not create ($directory)");

      Conversely, if you actually want to create the directory, often the real intent is to make sure it's newly created. So delete it first, then create it.

      rmtree($directory);
      -d $directory and die("Could not remove ($directory)");
       
      mkpath($directory);
      -d $directory or die("Could not create ($direct

      • In the case of rmtree, perhaps the test should be -e, not -d. I believe your test would fail if the file existed and was not a directory. (Could be wrong.)

        --
        J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers

    • The reason I did not do this is it doesn't work. mkpath returns a list of the directories created, not a success or failure. And if you run the program a second time, you get back an empty list (false) because the directory is already created.

      I like jplindstrom's approach, although in my case I immediately execute a chdir or die, which has more or less the same effect.

      --
      J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
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