Is there a way to make mv create the directory to be moved to if it doesn't exist?

Question

So, if I'm in my home directory and I want to move foo.c to ~/bar/baz/foo.c , but those directories don't exist, is there some way to have those directories automatically created, so that you would only have to type

mv foo.c ~/bar/baz/  

and everything would work out? It seems like you could alias mv to a simple bash script that would check if those directories existed and if not would call mkdir and then mv, but I thought I'd check to see if anyone had a better idea.

Answer 1

How about this one-liner (in bash):

mkdir --parents ./some/path/; mv yourfile.txt $_ 

Breaking that down:

mkdir --parents ./some/path # if it doesn't work; try mkdir -p ./some/path 

creates the directory (including all intermediate directories), after which:

mv yourfile.txt $_ 

moves the file to that directory ($_ expands to the last argument passed to the previous shell command, ie: the newly created directory).

I am not sure how far this will work in other shells, but it might give you some ideas about what to look for.

Here is an example using this technique:

$ > ls $ > touch yourfile.txt $ > ls yourfile.txt $ > mkdir --parents ./some/path/; mv yourfile.txt $_ $ > ls -F some/ $ > ls some/path/ yourfile.txt 

Answer 2

mkdir -p `dirname /destination/moved_file_name.txt`   mv /full/path/the/file.txt  /destination/moved_file_name.txt