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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-18T04:22:23+00:00

I want to create an empty directory structure bar2 from a nonempty directory tree

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I want to create an empty directory structure bar2 from a nonempty directory tree bar1.
Both bar1 and bar2 are at the same hierarchical level. How can I use mkdir in an efficient manner so that intermediate directories are automatically created?

  1. To create a directory list from bar1 with find and order it if necessary.
  2. Using awk, remove all branches from the list so that I can run `mkdir only on the leaves.
  3. Run mkdir with the list to replicate the directory structure of bar1
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  1. Editorial Team

    The hard part of your question (how to list only leaf directories) has been asked before on SO. You can use the find/awk combo there and run mkdir -p on each result:

    [bar1] $ find . -type d | sort | awk '$0 !~ last {print last} {last=$0} END {print last}' | xargs -Ix mkdir -p ../bar2/x
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