On Tue, Jan 03, 2017 at 12:28:46PM +0100, Sven Joachim wrote: > On 2017-01-03 05:13 -0600, Richard Owlett wrote: > > > I wish to duplicate a partition's directory structure without any of > > the existing file contents. The immediate application is a heavily > > customized version of an installation DVD. There are two underlying > > goals. I wish to reuse some existing utilities which expect to find > > data in a particular branch of the directory tree. The second is very > > similar in that a person familiar with a structure would assume that > > certain types of information will be in a particular sub-directory. > > > > Also this will be an educational experience as I expect the answer > > will be elegant in its simplicity and point me towards chasms in my > > understanding of Linux. > > Found this solution on [1], it seems to work. > > $ rsync -a -f"+ */" -f"- *" source/ destination/
Note: - a partition doesn't have a directory structure - a filesystem has a directory structure - often a filesystem is 1:1 with a partition, but this is not at all guaranteed - filesystems may span multiple partitions, or have more complicated physical representations (LVM, btrfs, zfs, RAID, networked filesystems, other systems and combinations thereof) - the root filesystem has a directory structure which can include other mounted filesystems, some of which may not represent data from any underlying persistent data storage In this particular case, you are *likely* to be OK with Sven's solution, but you will probably want to include other flags to rsync such as -x (do not cross filesystem mount boundaries) and in other situations perhaps -D or --specials (handling or ignorance of special file types). -dsr-
