Robin Naughton, PhD

Tech Tips: Batch Create Folders (PC)

Welcome to Tech Tips!

Tech tips is a place to share ideas for getting work done faster and more efficiently.  If it is possible to reduce the amount of time and manual work it takes to accomplish a task, then I like to find a way to do so.

Today’s topic is about batch processing.  I rather enjoy batch processing because it is an opportunity to learn the intricate nature of a process and then design a method to automate that process.  The batch process below is quick and easy to do on a PC.

Batch Create Folders

Why?  Because you have to create dozens or hundreds of folders for a project you’re working on and don’t have the time or resources to do it manually. You want something quick and easy to use.

FolderCreate

Text file of folder names.

  1. Folder Create Location: Navigate to the location where you’d like to create the batch of folders.  This process is focused on creating single directories.
  2. Create & Save Text File:  Create and save a text file with folder names where each line in the text file represents a folder that needs to be created. The text file can be named anything. The content of the text file should be in the format: md foldername
    1. md – the command to make directory
    2. space – separator between command and folder name
    3. foldername – the name of your folder. If you want to include a space in the foldername, add quotes around the name (i.e “Folder Name”)
  3. Change File Extension: Change the file extension from .txt to .bat to make a batch process that you can run.
  4. Double-click Batch File: Run the batch file by double-clicking it.  Once the batch is run, the folders with the name in the text file will be created in the current directory.
  5. All Done!