What is the verbose option in mkdir?

Question

I was working my way through a primer on Shell (Bash) Scripting and noticed the manpage of mkdir describes a verbose option which displays a message when a directory is created:

-v, --verbose
       print a message for each created directory

It seems mkdir -v has a pre-defined message it prints. Is there a way to print a custom message? Is there a way to permanently set a custom message instead of the default message?

Answer 1

You can create a script like this:

#/bin/bash

/bin/mkdir "$@" |sed -e"s/mkdir: created directory /$USER created folder /"

Then run that script rather than mkdir.

Modify that script for each message you want to change by adding an additional -e"s/x/y" to the sed.

If you insist on it being named mkdir, then you can put it in your search path before mkdir.

I would not recommend naming it mkdir. You will only cause yourself grief for other scripts that call mkdir

Answer 2

From the source code for mkdir.c, this is the section that deals with the -v option:

    case 'v': /* --verbose  */
      options.created_directory_format = _("created directory %s");
      break;

As you can see, the string that is used is hard-coded into the source. To permanently change the message to a custom message, one can modify this section of the source code and recompile mkdir.