Question

I’m a reporter who uses the following command to create a story folder with subfolders for each new story I begin:

/bin/mkdir -p ~/Desktop/NewStory/{Copy,Data,Notes,PubMaterial,RefMaterial,Media/{Audio,Images,Video}}

It works like a charm, but I’d also like to create a text file in the “Data” subfolder called “DataJournal.txt” and I don’t know how to do that.

Going one step further, I’d like to add the four headings of my data journals:

—Data Folder Setup

—Data Introduction

—Data Audit/Manipulation

—Data Queries

I can create such a text file now using an echo command but I have no idea how to work this into the command that creates the folders/subfolders. I’d be grateful for any help!

Answer 1

Just wrap the entire thing into a shell script and execute that instead of the mkdir command.

#!/bin/bash

if [[ -z "${1}" ]]; then
  die "FolderName Required"
fi


/bin/mkdir -p ~/Desktop/$1/{Copy,Data,Notes,PubMaterial,RefMaterial,Media/{Audio,Images,Video}}

echo -n "---Data Folder Setup

---Data Introduction

---Data Audit/Manipulation

---Data Queries" > ~/Desktop/$1/Data/DataJournal.txt

Adding a little generality the use of this script would be bash script-name.sh StoryName as $1 is interpolated into the first argument passed to the script. ( Or just ./script-name.sh StoryName if you happened to chmod +x it so it is executable ).