Copy folder structure (without files) from one location to another

I want to create a clone of the structure of our multi-terabyte file server. I know that cp --parents can move a file and it's parent structure, but is there any way to copy the directory structure intact?

I want to copy to a linux system and our file server is CIFS mounted there.

You could do something like:

find . -type d > dirs.txt

to create the list of directories, then

xargs mkdir -p < dirs.txt

to create the directories on the destination.

cd /path/to/directories &&
find . -type d -exec mkdir -p -- /path/to/backup/{} \;

Here is a simple solution using rsync:

rsync -av -f"+ */" -f"- *" "$source" "$target"

• one line
• no problems with spaces
• preserve permissions

I found this solution there

I dunno if you are looking for a solution on Linux. If so, you can try this:

$ mkdir destdir
$ cd sourcedir
$ find . -type d | cpio -pdvm destdir

This copy the directories and files attributes, but not the files data:

cp -R --attributes-only SOURCE DEST

Then you can delete the files attributes if you are not interested in them:

find DEST -type f -exec rm {} \;