Question

If you have a path to a file (for example, /home/bob/test/foo.txt) where each subdirectory in the path may or may not exist, how can I create the file foo.txt in a way that uses “/home/bob/test/foo.txt” as the only input instead of creating every nonexistent directory in the path one by one and finally creating foo.txt itself?

Answer 1

You can use File::Basename and File::Path

 use strict;
 use File::Basename;
 use File::Path qw/make_path/;

 my $file = "/home/bob/test/foo.txt";
 my $dir = dirname($file);
 make_path($dir);
 open my $fh, '>', $file or die "Ouch: $!\n"; # now go do stuff w/file

I didn’t add any tests to see if the file already exists but that’s pretty easy to add with Perl.