[gentoo-user] Cloning a directory hierarchy, but not the content

[Alex Schuster <wonko@wonkology.org>]

Hi there!

I am currently putting extra backups to old hard drives I do no longer need 
for other purposes. After that I send the putput out ls -lR and du -m to my 
log directory so I can check what files are on which drive without having to 
attach the drive.

Works, though a better method would be to clone the drive's root directory, 
but with all file sizes being zero. This way I can easily navigate the 
directory structure, instead of browsing through the ls-lR file. Is there a 
utility that does this? It would be even better if the files would be 
created as sparse files, faking the original size.  

I just wrote a little script that does this, but it does not do the sparse 
file thing yet, and would have problems with newline in file names. And I 
guess someone already wrote such a utility?

	Wonko