how to clone a directory list to another directory

Question

I am trying clone a directory and it's subdirectories into another directory. I have hundreds of music directories with sub-directories that I want to convert from flac to ogg. I want all the music Subdirectories under /Music to be cloned to /Music/Oggs/ so that when I do the conversion the files will all be written to the same directory names. Here's what I have:

/Music/Van_Halen_Discography/1980 Women And Children First/

What I need is the clone of directories to this:

/Music/Oggs/Van_Halen_Discography/1980 Women And Children First/

I tried using, 'find /Music -type d |cat > /Music/Oggs'

But it didn't work, what am I missing? Thanks

Answer 1

You could use rsync as follows.

 rsync -av -f"+ */" -f"- *" /path/to/Music/ /path/to/Music/oggs

Here -a tells rsync to recurse through dirs and preserve links, permissions and ownership while v makes it verbose. -f is a filter with the first argument including all directories and the second excluding all files. I suggest trying out on a small example first if you are unfamiliar with rsync.

Answer 2

There is a simple way, let's suppose you are in ~/Music/ with the current shell.

mkdir Oggs            # In case you do not have done before    
cp -rp !(Oggs) Oggs  

• cp is the normal command used in Linux to copy files and directories
• -rp or if you prefer -r -p are options to recurse through directories and to preserve time accesses, ownerships ...
  Use man cp for a more complete insight.
• !(Oggs) Tricky with ! you negate what is inside the parenthesis: so you are telling copy all file and not Oggs to Oggs

Note : This requires shopt extglob on, if is disabled use shopt -s extglob to enabled it.