Bulk Folder Creator

About creating folders in bulk

Setting up a folder structure by hand is the same twenty clicks every time: right click, New, Folder, type, Enter, repeat. Twelve months, four quarters, forty clients.

The cmd version is a .bat full of mkdir lines. That is faster until a name has a space in it, or an accent, or one of the characters Windows silently refuses — and then the script half-runs and leaves a mess that takes longer to clean up than doing it by hand would have taken.

This tool checks the whole list first. Paste the names, see the tree, then create them.

How to use it

• Type or paste your folder names, one per line
• Use / for subfolders — 2026/Q1/January — or switch to indented mode if you pasted an outline
• Use ranges to save typing: Project {1-10}, 2026-{01-12}, Client {A-F}
• Look at the tree. Anything Windows would refuse is marked in red with the reason
• Click Choose where to create them, then Create the folders now — or take a .bat / .sh script

Ranges

Ranges are the reason to use this rather than typing mkdir twelve times.

• Project {1-10} — Project 1 through Project 10
• 2026-{01-12} — 2026-01 through 2026-12. The leading zero in the range sets the width, so you get 2026-09, not 2026-9
• Client {A-F} — Client A through Client F
• {2025-2026}/Q{1-4} — two ranges in one line multiply out, giving all eight folders

Ranges also count backwards if you write them that way.

Three ways to write subfolders

• A slash — 2026/Q1/January. The usual choice, and what a generated list looks like
• Indentation — a pasted outline, where each level is a tab or two spaces deeper. Bullet characters at the start of a line are ignored, so a list copied out of a document works as it is
• Nothing — every line is one folder, even if it has a slash in it

Lines starting with # or // are treated as comments, so you can annotate a list you keep around.

The names Windows refuses

This is the part a mkdir script does not do for you. Each name is checked before anything is created:

• Forbidden characters — \ : * ? " < > | cannot appear in a name
• Reserved names — CON, PRN, AUX, NUL, COM1–COM9, LPT1–LPT9. MS-DOS claimed these in 1981 and Windows still refuses them today, even with an extension like CON.txt
• A trailing dot or space — Windows drops it, so Reports. becomes Reports and two lines of your list quietly become one folder
• Too long — over 255 characters in a single name
• Already in the list — the same path twice
• Already on disk — that one is not an error, just skipped

Bad rows are marked and left out. The rest are still created.

What people use it for

• Setting up a year of monthly folders in one go
• Building the same project folder structure for each new client or job
• Creating a folder per student, per invoice or per product from a list you already have
• Preparing folders for a photo shoot or event before the files arrive
• Rebuilding a structure on a new machine or drive from a list you saved
• Making the folders a sorting tool is about to fill

Good to know

• Chrome, Edge and Opera can create the folders here. Firefox and Safari get a .bat or .sh script instead
• Nothing is created until you press the button, and a folder that already exists is left exactly as it is
• Creating a folder destroys nothing, which is why the script arrives ready to run instead of commented out like the delete scripts
• Every parent level is created too, so a/b/c gives you all three
• Up to 2,000 folders at once, so a runaway range cannot freeze the page
• The tree shows the first 300 rows; all of them are created
• The Windows script starts with chcp 65001 so accented and non-Latin names are created correctly
• Mobile browsers cannot hand a folder to a web page, so this needs a computer

Related tools

• Sort Files Into Subfolders — fill the new folders automatically
• Organize Files by Date — date folders made for you from the files
• Folder and File List — export an existing structure as a list to reuse here
• Bulk File Rename — the same idea for file names
• Empty Folder Finder — find the ones that never got used