Cecilia Chavana-Bryant wrote: > Hola, > > I'm going through the 'Command line crash course' by Zed Shaw, thanks to > the people that recommended this book, its quite a good course, I can see > what the author was going for with the title but if it wasn't for your > recommendations, it would have put me off. At the beginning of Chapter 8 - > Moving around (pushd, popd) on Source: 13 exercise 8 I found this command: > mkdir -p i/like/icecream. I am guessing that the -p stands for directory > path?
Arguments like -p or --parents are options that change the behaviour of a command or allow you to pass optional arguments to it. $ mkdir i/like/icecream will fail unless the directories i and i/like already exist. The leaf directory i/like/icecream must not yet exist. If the -p option is provided $ mkdir -p i/like/icecream will silently create all intermediate (or "parent", hence the abbreviation) directories and not complain if a directory i/like/icream already exists. You can see $ mkdir -p i/like/icecream as a shortcut for $ mkdir i $ mkdir i/like $ mkdir i/like/icecream > I have seen other such letters sometimes with or without the ' - ' > before them (I think) in commands so my question is, what are these > letters for? what are they called? and could someone please point me to > where I can find a list of these with descriptions of what they do. I have > tried > googling with no positive results as I don't know what they are called or > I get just the information for the command they are used with. For every shell command there is a "manpage" that describes what the command does and what options it will accept. You can display the manpage for mkdir with $ man mkdir > Many thanks in advance for the help, Cecilia Well, here is the place for basic help, but it should normally be about Python... _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor