Copy directory tree without empty directories?

Question

I have the following tree

# upper letters = directory
# lower letters = files
A
|-- B
|-- C
    |-- D
    |-- e <= file
|-- F
    |-- G

I need to copy this tree to another destination, recursively ignoring all the empty directories. So the destination ends up looking like:

C
|-- e

How would you do this with unix, rsync, etc?

Dane O'Connor · Accepted Answer · 2014-05-26 20:19:33Z

54

Of course minutes later I discover an easy method. rsync has a --prune-empty-dirs option.

answered May 26, 2014 at 20:19

Dane O'Connor

1,3092 gold badges15 silver badges20 bronze badges

Add a comment |

VL-80 · Accepted Answer · 2014-05-27 00:01:52Z

There are various solutions to this problem (Taken from this web page):

This option uses the mkdir command with the find command. This method also requires that you be inside the source folder while executing the command.

bash$ cd /path/to/source && find . -type d -exec mkdir -p /path/to/dest/{} ;

Using find and cpio

bash$ find /path/to/source -type d | cpio -pd /path/to/dest/

Using Rsync

bash$ rsync -a --include '*/' --exclude '*' /path/to/source /path/to/dest

OR

bash$ rysnc -a -f"+ */" -f"- *" /path/to/source /path/to/dest

2 Answers 2