recursive mkdir - folder exists but user has no permissions on it

Question

I'm trying to recursively create directories through ssh.

The directory /home/user/staging exists. But the user has no permission to read /home. mkdir doesn't know if /home/user exists and tries to create it.

mkdir -p /home/user/staging/first/second/third/fourth/
mkdir: cannot create directory ‘/home/user’: Permission denied

How to skip this directory and go on creating where user has permission?

I'm trying to do it with my own script,

rec()
{
    dir=$1
    if [[ ! -e $dir ]]; then
        echo "creating $dir"
        newdir=$(echo $dir | sed 's:/[^/]*$::')
        rec $newdir
        mkdir $dir
    fi
}

Fore some reason this check fails if [[ ! -e $dir ]] and loop goes down past existing dirs and eventually doesn't create anything.

Answer 1

I didn't manage to make this script work.

However, solution is to use --relative option of rsync itself.

rsync -a --relative /new/x/y/z/ user@remote:/pre_existing/dir/

As described in this answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/22908437/6505678