Tar only the Directory structure

Question

I want to copy my directory structure excluding the files. Is there any option in the tar to ignore all files and copy only the Directories recursively.

Answer 1

You can use find to get the directories and then tar them:

find .. -type d -print0 | xargs -0 tar cf dirstructure.tar --no-recursion

If you have more than about 10000 directories use the following to work around xargs limits:

find . -type d -print0 | tar cf dirstructure.tar --no-recursion --null --files-from -

Answer 2

Directory names that contain spaces or other special characters may require extra attention. For example:

$ mkdir -p "backup/My Documents/stuff"
$ find backup/ -type d | xargs tar cf directory-structure.tar --no-recursion
tar: backup/My: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
tar: Documents: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
tar: backup/My: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
tar: Documents/stuff: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors

Here are some variations to handle these cases of "unusual" directory names:

$ find backup/ -type d -print0 | xargs -0 tar cf directory-structure.tar --no-recursion

Using -print0 with find will emit filenames as null-terminated strings; with -0 xargs will interpret arguments that same way. Using null as a terminator helps ensure that even filenames with spaces and newlines will be interpreted correctly.

It's also possible to pipe results straight from find to tar:

$ find backup/ -type d | tar cf directory-structure.tar -T - --no-recursion

Invoking tar with -T - (or --files-from -) will cause it to read filenames from stdin, expecting each filename to be separated by a line break.

For maximum effect this can be combined with options for null-terminated strings:

$ find . -type d -print0 | tar cf directory-structure.tar --null --files-from - --no-recursion

Of these I consider this last version to be the most robust, because it supports both unusual filenames and (unlike xargs) is not inherently limited by system command-line sizes. (see xargs --show-limits)