I was helping someone out the other day and was VNC’d into their server watching them work. I asked them to make a directory about 5 levels deep into the file system. They proceeded to make each directory one by one using mkdir. When they were done, I actually removed them all so I could spend a second to show them how to do so much quicker… Let’s say the directory you need created is /tmp/usr/tmp. Rather than using 3 mkdir commands and cd’ing in between it would actually behoove one to go about using the -p option with the mkdir command. To make this directory structure you could actually just use:
mkdir -p /tmp/usr/tmp
Now let’s say you wanted to create a file in this directory called test.txt. Well, you could then just run the following command to make the directory:
touch !$/test.txt
Now you have done what could otherwise take 10 commands in 2. Work smart, not hard. 😉
