Creating directories from a list

Question

I have a list (list.txt)

E001    Apples    Good stuff
E002    Pears    Nicely done
E091    Grapes    Bleah

I wanted to create directories using the first column so I tried

#!/bin/sh
for num in $(seq 1 3) #Because the list is long
do
cat list.txt | cut -f1 | awk 'NR==$num{print}' > idx.tmp
idx=$(idx.tmp)
mkdir $idx
rm idx.tmp
done

Not only is this conceivably bulky, it doesn't work - even though cat list.txt | cut -f1 | awk 'NR==1 {print}' cat list.txt | cut -f1 | awk 'NR==1 {print}' cat list.txt | cut -f1 | awk 'NR==1 {print}' gives me the name of the individual directory I want (ie E001)

Ideally I wish to obtain a bunch of empty folders created within the folder which the script ran (does that sound right?) named using the first column of each row in list.txt .

Answer 1

Try this:

cut -d " " -f 1 file | xargs echo mkdir

or

awk '{print $1}' file | xargs echo mkdir

If everything looks okay remove echo .

Answer 2

A simple loop suffices:

while read dirname others; do
    mkdir "$dirname"
done < list.txt

This reads a line at a time from the file, setting the value of dirname to the first field and others to the remaining portion for each line, and runs mkdir with the given directory name.