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Creating Directories Safely in Python: Handling Missing Parent Paths with OSError

Question:

How can I create a directory at a provided location and ensure any missing parent directories are also created using OSError? For instance, I want it to work as this Bash command:

mkdir -p /custom/path/to/folder


Answer:

One approach would involve handling OSError and examining the associated error code : 

import os
import errno

def create_directory(path):
   try:
       os.makedirs(path)
   except OSError as error:
       if error.errno != errno.EEXIST:
           raise

Overall, this code snippet is a simple function that creates a directory at the specified path while handling the case where the directory already exists. It ensures that no error is raised when the directory already exists, but it will raise other errors for any unexpected issues during the directory creation process.

Alternatively, modern Python versions offer improvements to this code, introducing FileExistsError (available in Python 3.3+):

try:
   os.makedirs("custom/path/to/folder")
except FileExistsError:
   # The directory already exists; no need to take further action
   pass
Additionally, starting from Python 3.2, you can use the exist_ok keyword argument with os.makedirs: 

os.makedirs("custom/path/to/folder", exist_ok=True)
# This will succeed even if the directory already exists.

When exist_ok is set to True, the function will not raise an exception if the specified directory already exists. Instead, it will silently complete without doing anything.

I hope it helps you!


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