How do I recursively create a folder in Win32?

Question

I'm trying to create a function that takes the name of a directory (C:\foo\bar, or ..\foo\bar\..\baz, or \\someserver\foo\bar), and creates directories as necessary so that the whole path is created.

I am attempting a pretty naive implementation of this myself and it seems to be a string processing nightmare. There is / vs \, there is the special case of network shares which begin with \\ (also you can't attempt to mkdir() the first two levels of the path which are machine name and share name), and there is \.\ type nonsense that can exist in a path.

Does there exist a simple way to do this in C++?

Answer 1

If you don't need to support Windows versions prior to Windows 2000, you can use the SHCreateDirectoryEx function for this. Consider this:

int createDirectoryRecursively( LPCTSTR path ) {     return SHCreateDirectoryEx( NULL, path, NULL ); }  // ... if ( createDirectoryRecursively( T("C:\\Foo\\Bar\\Baz") ) == ERROR_SUCCESS ) {    // Bingo! }  

In case using such shell32.dll API ever becomes an issue, you can always reimplement the createDirectoryRecursively function above with something else (possibly a hand-wired loop).