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Jim6834
Asked: 2019-10-21 04:01:29 +0800 CST

Function that creates a file in a directory

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I have 4 directories: dir1 dir2 dir3 dir4. I want to create a file in each directory. I know I can do this: touch file1.txt and then move it to dir1, then touch file2.txt then move it to dir2 but it takes ages. How can I create a function that creates a text file in each of the directories? Thanks

directory files functions

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You don't need to create and then move files - you can touch them in place ex.

    touch dir1/file1.txt dir2/file2.txt dir3/file3.txt

    It won't really save you any time (or typing) but you can of course create a shell function for this - a minimal implementation would be

    mkfile() { touch "$1"/"$2"; }

    which you can invoke as

    mkfile dir1 file1.txt

    although of course it should really include some checking / error handling (such as what to do if $1 is not a directory, or doesn't exist).

    If your file and directory structure is always of the form dirN/fileN.txt then there are some better ways to automate the creation such as

    seq 1 3 | xargs -I{} touch dir{}/file{}.txt

    or even (using GNU parallel and brace expansion)

    parallel touch dir{}/file{}.txt ::: {1..3}
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  2. Not sure what you regard as 'ages'. There's no function that would create 4 files in parallel for you. Assuming you're using bash or similar the 'easiest' way is probably a loop. e.g.:

    DIR=dir
for i in 1 2 3 4
do
  touch "${DIR}i"
done

    That's pretty quick on any machine I use. If you want an atomic 4 file create, I'm afraid there's no real way to do this.

    Note that if there's content in the 4 files, the 'quickest' way in terms of lag between the first file appearing and the last one would be create the files elsewhere and then mv them.

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