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

510
votes

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
7
linuxbashcp
@nelaar The age of the question is a secondary concern; the quality and breadth of the answers should be the deciding factor. I don't have a strong preference either way, but I don't think it's worth the effort at this point to turn around the duplicate relationship. If you think otherwise, please offer a rationale (perhaps on meta.stackoverflow.com for proper visibility and process). - tripleee
Looked for the same thing and could not find my answer below so will post how I ended up doing this: dirname "/nosuchdirectory/hi.txt" | while read path;do mkdir -p "$path"; done && cp -f urls-resume /nosuchdirectory/hi.txt - Greg0ry
See e.g. meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/251938/… - tripleee

7 Answers

306
votes

To expand upon Christian's answer, the only reliable way to do this would be to combine mkdir and cp:

mkdir -p /foo/bar && 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.
120
votes

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.

29
votes
 mkdir -p `dirname /nosuchdirectory/hi.txt` && cp -r urls-resume /nosuchdirectory/hi.txt
21
votes

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

21
votes

One can also use the command find:

find ./ -depth -print | cpio -pvd newdirpathname
9
votes

rsync is work!

#file:
rsync -aqz _vimrc ~/.vimrc

#directory:
rsync -aqz _vim/ ~/.vim
-8
votes
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