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

[Alex Schuster <wonko@wonkology.org>]

Etaoin Shrdlu writes:

> On Sat, 29 Jan 2011 14:58:13 +0100
> 
> Alex Schuster <wonko@wonkology.org> wrote:
> > 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?
> 
> IIUC, try
> 
> find / -type d -exec sh 'mkdir -p target"$1"' - {} \;

Hmm, that does not really seem to work. It tries to execute the whole stuff 
between single quotes as a command. And I don't really understand what it is 
supposed to do, shouldn't this be something like mkdir -p 
/destination/$1/\{\} ?

Anyway, this is what I already have. It duplicates the hierarchy with empty 
files, but I have to add support for sparse files. That won't be too hard, 
but maybe I'm re-inventing the wheel here.

#!/bin/bash

src=$1
dst=$2

cd "$src" || exit $?
IFS=$'\n'
find . |
	while read file
	do
		if [[ -d $file ]]
		then
			[[ -d "$dst/$file" ]] ||
				mkdir -p "$dst/$file"
		elif [[ -f $file ]]
		then
			[[ -d "$dst/${file%/*}" ]] ||
				mkdir -p "$dst/${file%/*}"
			touch "$dst/$file"
		fi
	done


	Wonko