How to have the cp command create only if necessary folders while copying a file to a destination

Question

When copying a file using cp to a folder that may/may not exist, how do I make sure to create the folder if necessary? 

I tried this;

[root@file nutch-0.9]# cp -f urls-resume /nosuchdirectory/hi.txt cp: cannot create regular file `/nosuchdirectory/hi.txt': No such file or directory

Answer 1

mkdir -p /foo/bar && cp myfile "$_" 

is indeed the only way to do this reliably.