The virtual parent trick
Assuming you have your source and destination file in
%SRC_FILENAME% and %DST_FILENAME%
you could use a 2 step method:
@REM on my win 7 system mkdir creates all parent directories also
mkdir "%DST_FILENAME%\.."
xcopy "%SRC_FILENAME% "%DST_FILENAME%\.."
this would be resolved to e.g
mkdir "c:\destination\b\c\file.txt\.."
@REM The special trick here is that mkdir can create the parent
@REM directory of a "virtual" directory (c:\destination\b\c\file.txt\) that
@REM doesn't even need to exist.
@REM So the directory "c:\destination\b\c" is created here.
@REM mkdir "c:\destination\b\c\dummystring\.." would have the same effect
xcopy "c:\source\b\c\file.txt" "c:\destination\b\c\file.txt\.."
@REM xcopy computes the real location of "c:\destination\b\c\file.txt\.."
@REM which is the now existing directory "c:\destination\b\c"
@REM (the parent directory of the "virtual" directory c:\destination\b\c\file.txt\).
I came to the idea when I stumbled over some really wild ../..-constructs in the command lines generated from a build process.