Creating a Directory from a Sentence Replacing Spaces with Dashes

01 Sep 2025

Sometimes we want to create a directory without having to think too hard.

Try the following mkdir $(echo "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet" |tr ' ' '-'). It creates a directory named Lorem-ipsum-dolor-sit-amet.

I prefer directories as all lowercase so let’s do that as well with mkdir $(echo "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet" | tr ' ' '-' | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]')

Wrapping it up as a parameterised shell script mklongdir

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -o errexit
set -o pipefail

target_dir=$1
mkdir $(echo ${target_dir} | tr ' ' '-' | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]')

and then

$ chmod +x mklongdir

Using it as mklongdir "Creating a Directory from a Sentence Replacing Spaces with Dashes" will create the directory creating-a-directory-from-a-sentence-replacing-spaces-with-dashes.

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