Create Folder during compute copy-files - google-compute-engine

Question

I want to copy a file from my laptop to the Compute Instance. Can i copy the file to a folder which does not exists but is created during the copy?
Example:
I have a file index.php and i want to copy it to /var/www/test
The folder test is not present.
When i run a command:
gcloud compute copy-files index.php user#instance-1:/var/www/test
It does not give any error. But when i ssh into the instance it shows test under /var/www but
cd /var/www/test
gives me:
-bash: cd: test: Not a directory
How can i create a directory and then copy a file?

Answer 1

This is an interesting set of circumstances leading to surprising results. To understand what's going on, it's useful to know that the gcloud compute copy-files command runs the scp command under the covers.
In this case, the scp command is interpreting /var/www/test as a destination path. Because /var/www exists, but /var/www/test does not, it's interpreting the test portion as the name of the file you want to save on the remote machine. So it's dutifully copying the contents of index.php into a file called /var/www/test on the remote machine.
To get the results you want, you should remove the file (with rm /var/www/test), and create a directory (with mkdir /var/www/test). If you were starting with a fresh machine, you could achieve the desired result like this:
gcloud compute ssh user#instance-1 --command='mkdir /var/www/test'
gcloud compute copy-files index.php user#instance-1:/var/www/test