How to have the cp command create any necessary folders for copying a file to a destination

Question

When copying a file using cp to a folder that may or may not exist  how do I get cp to create the folder if necessary  Here is what I have tried     root file nutch-0 9   cp -f urls-resume  nosuchdirectory hi txt cp  cannot create regular file   nosuchdirectory hi txt   No such file or directory

User · Answer

One can also use the command find   find    -depth -print   cpio -pvd newdirpathname

User · Answer

There is no such option  What you can do is to run mkdir -p before copying the file  I made a very cool script you can use to copy files in locations that doesn t exist     bin bash if     -d   2     then     mkdir -p   2  fi cp -R   1    2    Now just save it  give it permissions and run it using    cp-improved SOURCE DEST   I put -R option but it s just a draft  I know it can be and you will improve it in many ways  Hope it helps you

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To expand upon Christian s answer  the only reliable way to do this would be to combine mkdir and cp   mkdir -p  foo bar  amp  amp  cp myfile        As an aside  when you only need to create a single directory in an existing hierarchy  rsync can do it in one operation   I m quite a fan of rsync as a much more versatile cp replacement  in fact   rsync -a myfile  foo bar    works if  foo exists but  foo bar doesn t   bar is created

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For those that are on Mac OSX  perhaps the easiest way to work around this is to use ditto  only on the mac  AFAIK  though   It will create the directory structure that is missing in the destination   For instance  I did this   ditto 6 3 2 6 3 2 macosx bin mybinary   work binaries macosx 6 3 2    where   work did not contain the binaries directory before I ran the command   I thought rsync should work similarly  but it seems it only works for one level of missing directories  That is   rsync 6 3 3 6 3 3 macosx bin mybinary   work binaries macosx 6 3 3    worked  because   work binaries macosx existed but not   work binaries macosx 6 3 2

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I didn t know you could do that with cp    You can do it with mkdir      mkdir -p  var path to your dir   EDIT  See lhunath s answer for incorporating cp

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rsync is work    file  rsync -aqz  vimrc    vimrc   directory  rsync -aqz  vim     vim

User · Answer

mkdir -p  dirname  nosuchdirectory hi txt   amp  amp  cp -r urls-resume  nosuchdirectory hi txt

User · Answer

cp -Rvn  source path    destination path  cp   destination path any zip  No such file or directory   It will create no existing paths in destination  if path have a source file inside  This dont create empty directories   A moment ago i ve seen xxxxxxxx  No such file or directory  because i run out of free space  without error message   with ditto   ditto -V  source path    destination path ditto   destination path any zip  No space left on device   once freed space cp -Rvn  source path    destination path  works as expected

[linux] How to have the cp command create any necessary folders for copying a file to a destination

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