symlink-copying a directory hierarchy

Question

What's the simplest way on Linux to "copy" a directory hierarchy so that a new hierarchy of directories are created while all "files" are just symlinks pointing back to the actual files on the source hierarchy?
'cp -s' does not work recursively.
Thanks!
-Max

Answer 1

Starting from above the original & new directories, I think this pair of find(1) commands will do what you need:

find original -type d -exec mkdir new/{} \;
find original -type f -exec ln -s {} new/{} \;

The first instance sets up the directory structure by finding only directories in the original tree and recreating them in the new tree. The second creates the symlinks to the original files in the new tree.

Answer 2

I googled around a little bit and found a command called lns, available from here.

Answer 3

I just did a quick test on a linux box and cp -sR /orig /dest does exactly what you described: creates a directory hierarchy with symlinks for non-directories back to the original.

Answer 4

I know the question was regarding shell, but since you can call perl from shell, I wrote a tool to do something very similar to this, and posted it on perlmonks a few years ago. In my case, I generally wanted directories to remain links until I decide otherwise. It'd be a fairly trivial change to do this automatically and recursively.

Answer 5

There's also the "lndir" utility (from X) which does such a thing; I found it mentioned here: Debian Bug report #301030: can we move lndir to coreutils or debianutils? , and I'm now happily using it.