How can I create directories recursively? [duplicate]

Question

a fresh answer to a very old question:

starting from python 3.2 you can do this:

import os
path = '/home/dail/first/second/third'
os.makedirs(path, exist_ok=True)

thanks to the exist_ok flag this will not even complain if the directory exists (depending on your needs....).

---

starting from python 3.4 (which includes the pathlib module) you can do this:

from pathlib import Path
path = Path('/home/dail/first/second/third')
path.mkdir(parents=True)

---

starting from python 3.5 mkdir also has an exist_ok flag - setting it to True will raise no exception if the directory exists:

path.mkdir(parents=True, exist_ok=True)

os.makedirs is what you need. For chmod or chown you'll have to use os.walk and use it on every file/dir yourself.

Try using os.makedirs:

import os
import errno

try:
    os.makedirs(<path>)
except OSError as e:
    if errno.EEXIST != e.errno:
        raise

Here is my implementation for your reference:

def _mkdir_recursive(self, path):
    sub_path = os.path.dirname(path)
    if not os.path.exists(sub_path):
        self._mkdir_recursive(sub_path)
    if not os.path.exists(path):
        os.mkdir(path)

Hope this help!

I agree with Cat Plus Plus's answer. However, if you know this will only be used on Unix-like OSes, you can use external calls to the shell commands mkdir, chmod, and chown. Make sure to pass extra flags to recursively affect directories:

>>> import subprocess
>>> subprocess.check_output(['mkdir', '-p', 'first/second/third']) 
# Equivalent to running 'mkdir -p first/second/third' in a shell (which creates
# parent directories if they do not yet exist).

>>> subprocess.check_output(['chown', '-R', 'dail:users', 'first'])
# Recursively change owner to 'dail' and group to 'users' for 'first' and all of
# its subdirectories.

>>> subprocess.check_output(['chmod', '-R', 'g+w', 'first'])
# Add group write permissions to 'first' and all of its subdirectories.

EDIT I originally used commands, which was a bad choice since it is deprecated and vulnerable to injection attacks. (For example, if a user gave input to create a directory called first/;rm -rf --no-preserve-root /;, one could potentially delete all directories).

EDIT 2 If you are using Python less than 2.7, use check_call instead of check_output. See the subprocess documentation for details.