Recursive mkdir() system call on Unix

There is not a system call to do it for you, unfortunately. I'm guessing that's because there isn't a way to have really well-defined semantics for what should happen in error cases. Should it leave the directories that have already been created? Delete them? What if the deletions fail? And so on...

It is pretty easy to roll your own, however, and a quick google for 'recursive mkdir' turned up a number of solutions. Here's one that was near the top:

http://nion.modprobe.de/blog/archives/357-Recursive-directory-creation.html

static void _mkdir(const char *dir) {
    char tmp[256];
    char *p = NULL;
    size_t len;

    snprintf(tmp, sizeof(tmp),"%s",dir);
    len = strlen(tmp);
    if (tmp[len - 1] == '/')
        tmp[len - 1] = 0;
    for (p = tmp + 1; *p; p++)
        if (*p == '/') {
            *p = 0;
            mkdir(tmp, S_IRWXU);
            *p = '/';
        }
    mkdir(tmp, S_IRWXU);
}

hmm I thought that mkdir -p does that?

mkdir -p this/is/a/full/path/of/stuff