Sometimes it’s necessary to copy a directory structure without copying the actual files. This is a two step process as i’ve demonstrated below. However, i bet you can do it with a single command using “find” and its “exec” feature.
In this example we’ll copy the “/etc” directory structure.
cd /etc find ./ -type d > /tmp/etc-structure
That created a new file called “/tmp/etc-structure” which has contents that look like the following. Notice the “-type d” in the above “find” command. That excludes files and lists only directories.
./ ./sudoers.d ./sysctl.d ./update-notifier ./python2.7 ./X11 ./X11/xinit ./X11/xinit/xinitrc.d ./X11/Xsession.d ./X11/xkb ...
Now we use the above as a template to create the new structure. Go to where you want to create the new structure and run the following command. We’ll create ours in “/test”.
mkdir /test
for var in `cat /tmp/etc-structure`; do mkdir ${var}; done
The above command create the following structure of directories. There are sub-directories of course but i’m showing on the top level directories. I’ve listed only the first 10 directories here:
cd /test ls -l | head drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Nov 27 02:27 acpi drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 27 02:27 alternatives drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Nov 27 02:27 apache2 drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Nov 27 02:27 apm drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Nov 27 02:27 apparmor drwxr-xr-x 9 root root 4096 Nov 27 02:27 apparmor.d drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Nov 27 02:27 apport drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 4096 Nov 27 02:27 apt drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 27 02:27 bash_completion.d
You’ll noticed we’ve not considered file permissions and ownership. That’s a separate problem.