c++ - How do I recursively create a folder in Win32?

Question

I'm trying to create a function that takes the name of a directory (C:fooar, or ..fooar..az, or \someserverfooar), and creates directories as necessary so that the whole path is created.

I am attempting a pretty naive implementation of this myself and it seems to be a string processing nightmare. There is / vs , there is the special case of network shares which begin with \ (also you can't attempt to mkdir() the first two levels of the path which are machine name and share name), and there is . type nonsense that can exist in a path.

Does there exist a simple way to do this in C++?

Answer 1

If you don't need to support Windows versions prior to Windows 2000, you can use the SHCreateDirectoryEx function for this. Consider this:

int createDirectoryRecursively( LPCTSTR path )
{
    return SHCreateDirectoryEx( NULL, path, NULL );
}

// ...
if ( createDirectoryRecursively( T("C:\Foo\Bar\Baz") ) == ERROR_SUCCESS ) {
   // Bingo!
} 

In case using such shell32.dll API ever becomes an issue, you can always reimplement the createDirectoryRecursively function above with something else (possibly a hand-wired loop).