If you want to mirror a directory skeleton and copy no files:

find -type d -links 2 -exec mkdir -p "/path/to/backup/{}" ;

What's going on here:

• Find is only selecting directories


• We're using -links 2 to find the deepest possible directories.


• mkdir -p will make any missing directories along the way.

I've done it like this rather than find -type d -exec mkdir -p "/path/to/backup/{}" ; because it'll cut out on a whole buttload of mkdir calls. We can quickly prove this with a little test. Here's the test tree followed by what I ran to compare the two commands:

$ tree

.

├── dir1

│   ├── dir2

│   │   └── dir3

│   ├── dir7

│   └── dir8

└── dir9

    └── dir0



$ pr -m -t <(find -type d) <(find -type d -links 2)

.                               ./dir1/dir8

./dir1                          ./dir1/dir2/dir3

./dir1/dir8                     ./dir1/dir7

./dir1/dir2                     ./dir9/dir0

./dir1/dir2/dir3

./dir1/dir7

./dir9                  

./dir9/dir0 

And that's only going to get better in a real-word solution with thousands of directories.