How can I create multiple files using a single command on windows command line?

Question

The command for creating a new file on windows using cmd is:

cd.> filename.txt

But how can I create more than one file using a single command?

Answer 1

With PowerShell you can use New-Item with an array of filenames.

Note: ni is a built-in alias for New-Item, which is useful to substitute interactively.

# New-Item
ni fileA.txt, fileB.txt, filec.txt, "file_with_a_${var}_in_it.txt"

You can also use New-Item to create directories, but a shorter way to do this is to use mkdir instead, which is a built-in "alias" function for essentially calling New-Item -ItemType Directory:

# New-Item -ItemType Directory
mkdir dirA, dirB, dirC

Some tips

• If you want to suppress the output, you can pipe or redirect the output. Add | Out-Null or
  > $null to either example above (errors and other streams will still show as written).

• Both commands support fully-qualified paths and relative paths. You can provide a single string if you are only creating one item.

• You can add as many array elements as you would like, just separate each element in the array with a comma ,. You can also provide an array variable instead if you need.