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I need to create folders starting from 00 to 99 (00, 01, 02, 03, etc....) in several hundred places. Is there a single line command that will let me do that?

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2 Answers

up vote 39 down vote accepted

mulaz's answer is correct, but many people say seq is evil beacuse most shells will let you do the following

mkdir {00..99}

However in some older versions of bash, 0-9 arent padded, so you would have to do

mkdir 0{0..9} {10..99}
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+1 Should be the accepted answer IMHO. Not only is this idiomatic Bash, it doesn't require using an external program (which seq is). – Trollhorn Jun 12 '12 at 9:45
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This is how it should be done. – phoxis Jun 12 '12 at 15:09
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The following works too: > mkdir {0..9}{0..9} – Orieg Jun 12 '12 at 21:37
up vote 17 down vote

Will this do?

for i in `seq -w 0 99`; do mkdir $i; done

does a loop for numbers 0-99, and "-w" sets the equal width (0 padding for 0-9)

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Yup, this works perfectly. Thanks! – k1lljoy Jun 12 '12 at 0:15
6  
seq -w 0 99 | xargs mkdir would also do the job. – Jay Jun 12 '12 at 0:24
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You can ditch the loop and just do mkdir $(seq -w 0 99). Or use backticks instead of $(), but I can't put backticks in because of serverfault syntax. – Patrick Jun 12 '12 at 0:52
@Patrick: Yes, you can: mkdir `seq -w 0 99` (I couldn't avoid the extra space). See here, but it looks like the trick of including spaces in the delimiters doesn't work here. – Keith Thompson Jun 12 '12 at 1:24
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@Patrick backticks are bad: mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/082 – Andrew Jun 12 '12 at 2:21
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