Elegant way to make all dirs in a path

You are looking for os.makedirs() which does exactly what you need.

The documentation states:

Recursive directory creation function. Like mkdir(), but makes all intermediate-level directories needed to contain the leaf directory. Raises an error exception if the leaf directory already exists or cannot be created.

Because it fails if the leaf directory already exists you'll want to test for existence before calling os.makedirs().

On Python 3.6+ you can do:

import pathlib

path = pathlib.Path(p4)
path.parent.mkdir(parents=True, exist_ok=True)

A simple way to build the paths in POSIX systems. Assume your path is something like: dirPath = '../foo/bar', where neither foo or bar exist:

path = ''
for d in dirPath.split('/'):
   # handle instances of // in string
   if not d: continue 

   path += d + '/'
   if not os.path.isdir(path):
      os.mkdir(path)