Create a stack of folders named from a .txt file

Question

I have a one column text file (dates.txt) and I want to create a stack of directories named after the dates elements.

How can I interpret it in bash?

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 11 '17 at 14:22

2

Read in the contents of the file, and make directories for each entry in your data file, like this:

while IFS= read -r dat; 
do 
   mkdir "$dat"
done < dates.txt

answered Dec 11 '17 at 14:22

suspectus

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 11 '17 at 14:35

2

xargs mkdir < dates.txt

xargs will read the lines of its stdin, and append the lines to the given command. This will minimize the number of times mkdir is invoked.

answered Dec 11 '17 at 14:35

glenn jackman

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Dec 11 '17 at 14:40

With mapfile (Bash 4.0 or newer):

mapfile -t names < dates.txt && mkdir "${names[@]}"

This reads the lines into an array names and then calls mkdir with the expanded, properly quoted array elements as arguments.

The -t is required to remove the newline from the end of each element.

3 Answers3