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

[Etaoin Shrdlu]

On Sat, 29 Jan 2011 14:58:13 +0100
Alex Schuster <wonko@×××××××××.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"' - {} \;