Linux: can I create directories that don't exist while creating a new file?

Question

I can do:

mkdir messages

and then:

touch messages/hello.txt

Is there a command that will do both - create the directory if it doesn't exist, and then the empty file? Something like:

touch -p messages/hello.txt

Answer 1

Not with anything in coreutils, but here's a bash function for that:

mktouch() {
  mkdir -p "$(dirname "$1")"
  touch "$1"
}