Automating folder creation

I create the disks I store off-site on a server that has USB-attached boxes that accept bare drives. Whenever I load a brand new disk, I need to create the directory structure the Vice Versa expects. I used to do this manually, which was error-prone and boring. Now I use a script.

If you’re not familiar with scripts, they don’t have to be complicated (although they certainly can be if you want). Windows has an ancient scripting capability that dates back to MS-DOS. There is a more modern scripting language called PowerShell that’s supported by the later Windows OS’s.

The Mac OS X, being Unix with a pretty face, uses the Unix Bourne shell. Apple provides a very nice turorial here.

If you run Linux, you probably know all about shell scripts.

Here’s the script I use to create the directory structure for one of my off-site backup disks on a machine running Windows Server 2008R2:

You can create this file with any text editor that can write unformatted text files. You give it a file extension of .bat, so that the OS knows it’s a sequence of commands, and what language it’s written in. On Mac OS X and Linux machines, the details are different, but the idea is the same.

Here’s what the bat file does.

1. The first line changes to the H: disk, which is assumed to be freshly formatted.
2. The “md” (make directory) command creates a bunch of folders.
3. The “cd” (change directory) changes to one of the newly-created folders.
4. The next md command makes two more folders in the new directory.
5. The next cd command changes to one of the new folders.
6. The next md command creates two more folders in the new directory.

After I run the script, the directory structure on the disk looks like this:

• Classical
• Data
• Desktops
• …..Honker
• ……….Desktop
• ……….Docs
• …..Alice
• Goodsync
• iTunes
• MP3s
• Pop1
• Pop2
• Programs