How do I create directories named after each month?

Question

I would like to create a directory name for each month. I know, after some playing with the shell, that:

date -d 1/01 +%b # Gives Jan
date -d 2/01 +%b # Gives Feb
.
date -d 12/01 +%b # Gives Dec

So I have used brace expansion, echo {1..12}/01 and tried to xargs it:

echo {1..12}/01 | xargs -n 1 -I {} date -d {} +%b

But it fails miserably :/ (afterwards I'd like to apply mkdir). How can I do this?

Answer 1

With -I, xargs gets one argument per line as opposed to the default of one argument per (blank or newline delimited, possibly quoted) word without -I (and implies -n). So in your example date is called only once with {} expanded to the whole output of echo (which is on one line), minus the trailing newline.

Here you can do (note that that -d is a GNU extension):

printf '%s\n' {1..12}/01 | xargs -I {} date -d {} +%b | xargs mkdir --

(note that it won't work correctly in locales where month name abbreviations contain spaces or quote characters; with GNU xargs, you can work around that by using xargs -d '\n' mkdir --)

Now, to get the list of month abbreviations in your locale, querying the locale directly would make more sense:

(IFS=';'; set -o noglob; mkdir -- $(locale abmon))

(see also locale -k LC_TIME to see all the locale data in the LC_TIME category).

Or natively in zsh:

zmodload zsh/langinfo
mkdir -- ${(v)langinfo[(I)ABMON_*]}

At least on GNU systems, in some locales, month abbreviations are padded to fixed width with spaces:

$ LC_ALL=et_EE.UTF-8 locale title abmon
Estonian locale for Estonia
jaan ;veebr;märts;apr  ;mai  ;juuni;juuli;aug  ;sept ;okt  ;nov  ;dets
$ LC_ALL=zh_TW.UTF-8 locale title abmon
Chinese locale for Taiwan R.O.C.
 1月; 2月; 3月; 4月; 5月; 6月; 7月; 8月; 9月;10月;11月;12月

You may want to remove that padding.

The leading spaces would be removed by xargs -I, but not the trailing ones. With zsh:

zmodload zsh/langinfo
set -o extendedglob
mkdir -- ${${${(v)langinfo[(I)ABMON*]}##[[:space:]]#}%%[[:space:]]#}

Answer 2

Try a loop?

$ for m in {1..12}; do
> date -d "$m"/01 +%b
> done
jan
feb
mar
apr
maj
jun
jul
aug
sep
okt
nov
dec

If you want to make a directory for each month, I would do something like:

for m in {1..12}; do newdir=$(date -d "$m"/01 +%b); mkdir "$newdir"; done

Answer 3

Your command does not work, because of using -I changes the delimiter of xargs:

-I replace-str
Replace occurrences of replace-str in the initial-arguments with names read from standard input. Also, unquoted blanks do not terminate input items; instead the separator is the newline character.

You can add -d " " to xargs to make it work. But you don't even need -I{} in your case:

Try this,

echo {1..12}/01 | xargs -n1 date +%b -d | xargs mkdir

Answer 4

In shells with brace expansion, and date accepting DATAFILE input, try

echo {01..12}/01$'\n' | date -f- +"mkdir %b"

and pipe into shell if happy with the result.

Answer 5

You where so so close.

The problem is that echo is producing a single line 1/01 2/01 3/01 4/01 5/01 6/01 7/01 8/01 9/01 10/01 11/01 12/01, and that xargs is using the newline character as a field separator (not the space).

The solution: Tell echo to put a space between each field.

echo -e {1..12}/01\\n | xargs -n 1 -I {} date -d {} +%b

I only inserted \\n at the end of the echo.

Then to make the directories add |xargs mkdir

e.g.

echo -e {1..12}/01\\n | xargs -n 1 -I {} date -d {} +%b | xargs mkdir

Answer 6

The simplest and most robust way of doing this:

mkdir jan feb mar apr maj jun jul aug sep okt nov dec

It's a static list of months after all...

If you are intent on using GNU date (here assuming an unmodified $IFS and GNU date like for your date -d):

mkdir $( printf '%s\n' {1..12}/01 | date -f - +%b )