Unix Directory Creation

One of the most common inefficient habits of Unix users is iterative directory creation:

$ mkdir project
$ cd project
$ mkdir docs
$ cd docs
$ mkdir html

You may (or may not) already be aware of the -p flag, which allows you to create parent AND child directories in one command:

$ mkdir -p project/docs/html

Not many people are aware, however, that you can create arbitrarily complex directory trees using the -p flag and some curly braces:

$ mkdir -p proj/{bin,etc,docs/{html,txt,pdf},src}

If the example above represented a common project layout, you could add a quick alias to .bashrc in your home directory:

alias mkproj="mkdir -p proj/{bin,etc,docs/{html,txt,pdf},src}"