non-interactive shell

[B. T. Raven]

Apparently it's not possible to make a new directory with:

 (shell-command (concat "md " path))

where path is some string like

"\\a\\b\\c"

Is it possible at all to make a directory under the default-directory 
with elisp and using a variable rather than a literal string. Of course 
M-! works fine but that requires manual intervention. If this is not 
possible on the w32 port, can it be done in Emacs under Gnu/Linux?


Thanks for any help,

Ed