copy a directory structure with file names without content

linux copy structure rsync
Juergen Riemer picture Juergen Riemer · Aug 14, 2012 · Viewed 10.5k times · Source

I have a huge directory structure of movie files. For analysis of that structure I want to copy the entire directory structure, i.e. folders and files however I don't want to copy all the movie files while I want to keep there file names. Ideally I get zero-byte files with the original movie file name.

I tried to and then rsync to my remote machine which didn't fetch the link files.

Any ideas how to do that w/o writing scripts?

Answer

Chen Levy picture Chen Levy · Aug 14, 2012

You can use find:

find src/ -type d -exec mkdir -p dest/{} \; \
       -o -type f -exec touch dest/{} \;

Find directory (-d) under (src/) and create (mkdir -p) them under dest/ or (-o) find files (-f) and touch them under dest/.

This will result in:

dest/src/<file-structre>

You can user mv creatively to resolve this issue.

Other (partial) solution can be achieved with rsync:

rsync -a --filter="-! */" sorce_dir/ target_dir/

The trick here is the --filter=RULE option that excludes (-) everything that is not (!) a directory (*/)

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