Does Ruby Have Mkdir -P

Does Ruby have mkdir -p?

require 'fileutils'
FileUtils.mkdir_p 'cool/beans'

How to create directories recursively in ruby?

Use mkdir_p:

FileUtils.mkdir_p '/a/b/c'

The _p is a unix holdover for parent/path you can also use the alias mkpath if that makes more sense for you.

FileUtils.mkpath '/a/b/c'

In Ruby 1.9 FileUtils was removed from the core, so you'll have to require 'fileutils'.

Ruby FileUtils.mkdir_p is only creating parent directories

Because you use dir = File.dirname("#{Rails.root}/public/graph_templates/aaa/test"),

then the dir is "#{Rails.root}/public/graph_templates/aaa".

You could just pass the path to FileUtils.mkdir_p.

  def create_temporary_template
    dir = "#{Rails.root}/public/graph_templates/aaa/test"
    FileUtils.mkdir_p dir
  end

Create Directory if it doesn't exist with Ruby

You are probably trying to create nested directories. Assuming foo does not exist, you will receive no such file or directory error for:

Dir.mkdir 'foo/bar'
# => Errno::ENOENT: No such file or directory - 'foo/bar'

To create nested directories at once, FileUtils is needed:

require 'fileutils'
FileUtils.mkdir_p 'foo/bar'
# => ["foo/bar"]

Edit2: you do not have to use FileUtils, you may do system call (update from @mu is too short comment):

> system 'mkdir', '-p', 'foo/bar' # worse version: system 'mkdir -p "foo/bar"'
=> true

But that seems (at least to me) as worse approach as you are using external 'tool' which may be unavailable on some systems (although I can hardly imagine system without mkdir, but who knows).

FileUtils.mkdir_p doesn't work

Your code worked for me. Have you tried running it with the verbose flag?

FileUtils.mkdir_p("/Users/naorye/.../thumbnails", :verbose => true)

FileUtils.mkdir_p is analogous to the unix shell command mkdir -p, which creates the terminal directory and all intermediate directories in the path you specify. As for the synonyms mkpath and makedirs, they're likely there for the same reason Enumerable has both inject and reduce.

How do I create directory if none exists using File class in Ruby?

You can use FileUtils to recursively create parent directories, if they are not already present:

require 'fileutils'

dirname = File.dirname(some_path)
unless File.directory?(dirname)
  FileUtils.mkdir_p(dirname)
end

Edit: Here is a solution using the core libraries only (reimplementing the wheel, not recommended)

dirname = File.dirname(some_path)
tokens = dirname.split(/[\/\\]/) # don't forget the backslash for Windows! And to escape both "\" and "/"

1.upto(tokens.size) do |n|
  dir = tokens[0...n]
  Dir.mkdir(dir) unless Dir.exist?(dir)
end

Why can't I use mkdir with a Pathname object?

You need to specify the directory you want to create with Pathname and then call mkdir.

This should work:

p = Pathname.new('/tmp/123adam')
p.mkdir

The argument you can supply are the permissions for the new directory.

How do I create a subdirectory if no one exists when writing to a CSV file?

You can do this:

require "fileutils"

csvfile= 'tmp/folder1/folder2/folder3/foo.csv'

FileUtils::mkdir_p File.dirname csvfile

mkdir_p is line gnu mkdir -p which creates the directory structure for you, and won't complain if the directory already exists.

dirname returns the directory name.

If you want specify permissions when creating the directory do this:

FileUtils::mkdir_p( File.dirname(csvfile) , :mode => 0777)

Where does ~/ point in Ruby?

In Ruby, ~ has no special meaning in file paths. Even if it is used inside the parameter of a system call, it is not expanded by the underlying shell. Your code should have created a directory literally named ~ inside the current working directory, for example:

$ ruby -e 'system("mkdir", "-p", "~/.dir")'
$ ls
~
$ ls -A '~'
.dir

You have to use File.expand_path to expand the ~ to your home directory path:

File.expand_path('~')
# => "/home/toro2k"

In your example:

system('mkdir', '-p', File.expand_path('~/.dir'))

In Ruby you can also use FileUtils.mkdir_p to create directories:

require 'fileutils'
FileUtils.mkdir_p(File.expand_path('~/.dir'))

Update: as suggested by the Tin Man my latter example can be rewritten using the Pathname class as follows:

require 'pathname'
Pathname.mkpath(Pathname.new('~/.dir').expand_path)

FileUtils.mkdir can not create a directory

you need FileUtils.mkdir_p "/tmp/bar/foo"

mkdir_p behaves exactly as mkdir -p on UNIXes - if some dir does not exists it will be created.

I bet there are no /tmp/bar dir and Ruby fails to create a dir into an non-existing folder.

---

Related Topics