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.

score 18 · Answer 1 · edited Jul 02 '19 at 08:54

18

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 -

edited Jul 02 '19 at 08:54

Tometzky

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answered Aug 21 '12 at 15:15

perreal

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In earlier GNU tars apparently the position where you placed the **--no-recursion** argument did not matter for it to work while in more current versions it apparently needs to preceed the **--files-from** option... My backups just exploded after upgrading from Debian Wheezy to Debian Stretch which includes GNU tar 1.29. I edited the answer accordingly. – Gunter Ohrner May 30 '18 at 13:23
I've edited the answer and moved `--no-recursion` before `--files-from`. – Tometzky Jul 02 '19 at 08:55

score 6 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 21 '13 at 21:53

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)

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 21 '12 at 15:14

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for i in `find . -type d`; do mkdir -p /tmp/tar_root/`echo $i|sed 's/\.\///'`; done
pushd /tmp/tar_root
tar cf tarfile.tar *
popd
# rm -fr /tmp/tar_root

answered Aug 21 '12 at 15:14

mschr

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score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Aug 02 '13 at 16:40

go into the folder you want to start at (that's why we use find dot) save tar file somewhere else. I think I got an error leaving it right there. tar with r not c. I think with cf you keep creating new files and you only get the last set of file subdirectories. tar r appends to the tar file. --no-recursion because the find is giving you your whole list of files already so you don't want to recurse.

find . -type d |xargs tar rf /somewhereelse/whatever-dirsonly.tar --no-recursion

tar tvf /somewhereelse/whatever-dirsonly.tar |more to check what you got.

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Sep 06 '19 at 13:15

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For AIX:

tar cvfD some-tarball.tar `find /dir_to_start_from -type d -print`

answered Sep 06 '19 at 13:15

Prokhozhii

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Tar only the Directory structure

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