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How to force mkdir to create a directory if there isn’t already one

By admin | September 3, 2008

If you’ve ever tried to make a directory if there isn’t one existing, you probably have bumped into the following error:
mkdir: cannot create directory `the_directory': File exists

To fix this, use this instead to suppress error and create parent directories if needed:
mkdir -p your_directory

For more information, see the mkdir page at Wikipedia.

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Topics: Linux | 3 Comments »

3 Responses to “How to force mkdir to create a directory if there isn’t already one”

  1. Gaurav Khurana Says:
    April 20th, 2015 at 11:46

    Thanks it worked in full go ,, can you share what p stands for

  2. admin Says:
    June 6th, 2016 at 02:50

    -p serves to force mkdir to also create the parent directories (hence the ‘p’).

  3. Rajesh Damam Says:
    October 9th, 2019 at 06:31

    what if my directory is not a parent directory

    [ram@raj ~]$ mkdir opt
    [ram@raj ~]$ ls
    opt

    [ram@raj opt]$ mkdir java
    mkdir: cannot create directory ‘java’: Permission denied
    [ram@raj opt]$ mkdir -p java

    mkdir: cannot create directory ‘java’: Permission denied
    [ram@raj opt]$

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