copy a directory structure with file names without content - linux

Question

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 1

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 (*/)

Answer 2

On ubuntu you can try:
cp -r --attributes-only <source_dir> <target_dir>
It doesn't copy file data.
From manpage of cp
--attributes-only
don't copy the file data, just the attributes
Note: I'm not sure this option available for other distributions, if anybody can confirm please update the answer.

Answer 3

I needed an alternative to this to sync only the file structure:
rsync --recursive --times --delete --omit-dir-times --itemize-changes "$src_path/" "$dst_path"
This is how I realized it:
# sync source to destination
while IFS= read -r -d '' src_file; do
dst_file="$dst_path${src_file/$src_path/}"
# new files
if [[ ! -e "$dst_file" ]]; then
if [[ -d "$src_file" ]]; then
mkdir -p "$dst_file"
elif [[ -f $src_file ]]; then
touch -r "$src_file" "$dst_file"
else
echo "Error: $src_file is not a dir or file"
fi
echo -n "+ "
ls -ld "$src_file"
# modification time changed (files only)
elif [[ -f $dst_file ]] && [[ $(date -r "$src_file") != $(date -r "$dst_file") ]]; then
touch -r "$src_file" "$dst_file"
echo -n "+ "
ls -ld "$src_file"
fi
done < <(find "$src_path" -print0)
# delete files in destination if they disappeared in source
while IFS= read -r -d '' dst_file; do
src_file="$src_path${dst_file/$dst_path/}"
# file disappeard on source
if [[ ! -e "$src_file" ]]; then
delinfo=$(ls -ld "$dst_file")
if [[ -d "$dst_file" ]] && rmdir "$dst_file" 2>/dev/null; then
echo -n "- $delinfo"
elif [[ -f $dst_file ]] && rm "$dst_file"; then
echo -n "- $delinfo"
fi
fi
done < <(find "$dst_path" -print0)
As you can see I use echo and ls to display changes.

Answer 4

ls > listOfMovie.txt; You will have the list of your films in a .txt file
.For multiple directories see the man page.