At Thanh’s request, I’m sharing this. Consider it a sneak preview for our upcoming “AE Labs” project.
One of the ways that we organize ourselves at Asian Efficiency is to have one folder per article or post we write. This is used for storing the article, the mind map, images and anything else relevant. Think of it as a project folder.
Now obviously, efficiency comes from doing things in batches. So, how do you make 40+ folders at the same time?
1. Create a text file with folder names. I simply did this by copying out of our planning spreadsheet, replacing spaces with dashes and adding dates (all easily done in Excel). We then get something that looks like this:
20120601-article1 20120602-article2 20120603-article3 20120604-article4 20120605-article5 20120606-article6 20120607-article7 20120608-article8 20120609-article9 20120610-article10 20120611-article11 20120612-article12 20120613-article13 20120614-article14 20120615-article15 20120616-article16 20120617-article17 20120618-article18 20120619-article19 20120620-article20
Note that the date format of YYYMMDD allows computers to sort dates in ascending or descending orders easily, and completely eliminates any confusion caused by US-or-rest-of-the-world date formats.
2. Save as folders.txt in a temporary directory.
3. Open Terminal (Mac/Unix only). Not sure about Windows PowerShell. Go to the folder where folders.txt is.
4. Type the command:
$ cat folders.txt | xargs mkdir
I am by no means a proficient terminal user or programmer, but let me try to break that down.
$ is the standard prompt for Terminal. You don’t type it, it appears when you first launch Terminal.
cat stands for concatenate. Which means it takes folders.txt and reads it sequentially (line by line) then outputs it.
| is a pipe, which means it takes whatever is to the left of the pipe and outputs it to the command on the right of the pipe.
xargs I have no idea. Wikipedia has a complicated explanation. I’m thinking of it as “compleX ARGumentS“, meaning it takes a long list of something and lets other commands interpret it easier.
mkdir stands for make directory.
5. You’re done!