Script that lets you be very lazy when it comes to creating/reopening a project in VS Code.

codep.sh

#!/bin/sh

if [ "$#" -ne 1 ]; then
	cat <<- EOF
		Usage:	$0 PROJECT
		Creates the ~/workspace/PROJECT directory if it doesn't exist and opens it in VS Code.
	EOF
	exit 1
fi

mkdir -p ~/workspace/"$1"
code ~/workspace/"$1"

Quick explanations for shell scripting newbies:

#!/bin/sh

The line above says the script should run using the /bin/sh command which should be a POSIX-compatible shell.

if [ "$#" -ne 1 ]; then

This checks if the number of arguments passed to the codep.sh script is not equal to 1. This is more of an internal detail, but [ and ] are actually not part of the syntax of the if statement, [ is a command, and "$#" -ne 1 ] are the arguments we passed to it.

cat <<- EOF
	Usage:	$0 PROJECT
	Creates the ~/workspace/PROJECT directory if it doesn't exist and opens it in VS Code.
EOF

The cat command is normally used to output the contents of a file, but here I'm using it to output a here-document, a special block of text that spans multiple lines. There are many ways to begin a here-document, <<- is one that strips leading TAB characters. EOF is an arbitrary word; whatever you type after the <<- and before the newline will be used as the delimiter to mark the end of the here-document. The closing delimiter has to be on its own line. I chose EOF which stands for End Of File.

mkdir -p ~/workspace/"$1"

The -p flag creates all missing directories in the provided path, and doesn't complain if some or all of them already exist.

code ~/workspace/"$1"

You might be wondering why all the variables I write are within quotations marks. This ensures the contents of the variable are not split on whitespace and parsed as path patterns. It's a good idea to pretty much always use variables within quotation marks, except inside a here-document.

exit 1 tells the shell that something went wrong. This is useful for scripting, but some shells can be configured to look different when the last command exited with a non-zero exit-code. Additionally, [ is actually a command that exits 0 when the condition inside passes.