what's the option for cp to create a directory if not exists?

Question

Here is what I tried but failed:

[root@file nutch-0.9]# cp -f urls-resume /nosuchdirectory/hi.txt
cp: cannot create regular file `/nosuchdirectory/hi.txt': No such file or directory
[root@file nutch-0.9]#

besides,any way to make ">" work that way,say to create a directory when need?

[root@file nutch-0.9]# echo test > /nosuchtest/hi.txt
-bash: /nosuchtest/hi.txt: No such file or directory

Answer 1

I didn't know you could do that with cp.

You can do it with mkdir ..

mkdir -p /var/path/to/your/dir

Answer 2

There is no such option. What you can do is to run mkdir -p before copying the file

I made a very cool script you can use to copy files in locations that doesn't exist

#!/bin/bash
if [ ! -d "$2" ]; then
    mkdir -p "$2"
fi
cp -R "$1" "$2"

Now just save it, give it permissions and run it using

./cp-improved SOURCE DEST

I put -R option but it's just a draft, I know it can be and you will improve it in many ways. Hope it helps you

Answer 3

As far as I know, you can only created directories if they exists at the source, so: cp -R /usr/local /usr/local-backup

will create directories further down the hierarchy.