How To: Make A Directory In Linux

Today’s article will teach you how to make a directory in Linux. Making a directory in Linux is pretty basic, straightforward, and easy. There are some options when making directories which we’ll be covering, but we’ll just be using ‘mkdir‘ for this exercise.

You’ll find the man page describes mkdir eloquently enough:

mkdir – make directories

And that’s exactly what it does. It’s a tool for making directories. Again, it’s pretty straightforward.

If you want a decently useful directory structure, you’re going to want more than the default directories. You’re going to want to make a consistent and meaningful directory structure, which will save you quite a bit of time and effort. Life is easier when you have a useful directory structure that makes sense to you – making things easier to find.

In case one doesn’t know, you can use ‘folder’ as a synonym for ‘directory’. It’s a hierarchical marker to which files can be designated – meaning you can stick stuff in your folder if you want to. They’re one of the best ways to organize your files in a meaningful fashion.

Like files, there are permissions for folders. Often, those permissions are inherited by the files within, though that’s not strictly necessary. We’ll lightly cover that as well.

For such a simple subject, there’s a bit of meat to it. We’ll cover that too in this article about how to make a directory in Linux. It’s mostly a beginner oriented article, but there may be some options that are unfamiliar more advanced users.

On to the article!

Make A Directory In Linux:

This article requires an open terminal, just like many other articles on this site. You can do so with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

Once you have your terminal open, you can change directories or make these practice directories in your home folder (which would lead to clutter). So, if you want you can run mkdir tmp && cd tmp to get a fairly clean workspace going. (See? We’re using mkdir already!)

Anyhow, a nice basic use is to make a directory. To make a directory called ‘foo’ then you’d simply use:

mkdir foo

If you want to make parent and child directories, you can also do that with just one command:

mkdir -p foo/bar/foobar

You can even make multiple directories in the same directory. That’s just a simple use of brackets and looks like this:

mkdir {foo,bar,foobar}

If you want to set permissions at the same time, that’s also an option:

mkdir -m666 foo

You can also add the -v flag (meaning ‘verbose’) to any of these commands. That will output the results of your command so that you can verify that the command actually created the appropriate directories. After all, you never know when you’ll fat-finger something.

Closure:

There you have it! It’s another article, this one teaching you how to use the mkdir command to make a directory in Linux. This article is not terribly difficult, but there are a few advanced options that can make your file management even better. It’s a handy set of flags to know if you’re keen on keeping your system free of clutter.

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