Every year, I run into the same problem. I need to replicate the directory or folder structure of my previous’ year’s administration folder to use it for the new year.

If you remember my post on my paperless office (which has changed slightly, later more), I have a directory structure for my company administration to easily retrieve incoming and outgoing invoices and other paper mail which I want to keep available in a digital archive.

Anyway, what happens every year is that I forgot how I did it the year before, run to Google and type in “copy directory structure” and find always on top a purple link.

You can read all the options, but I always only need one of these in a Terminal window:

user@osx:~/from$ find . -type d -exec mkdir -p ~/to/{} \;

user@osx:~/from$ find . -type f -exec ln -s ~/from/{} ~/to/{} \;

or

user@osx:~/from$ find . -type f -exec touch ~/to/{} \;

All credits go to whitequark.