On 09/20/12 22:13, Alan McKinnon wrote:
On Thu, 20 Sep 2012 20:33:39 +0800
Andrew Lowe <a...@wht.com.au> wrote:
Hi all,
I have the situation where I have a large amount of data,
many TB's, made up of many, many files. This information has now been
archived but I've got people who want to be able to see what data
does/does not exist, filling in gaps where they may exist.
As this data used to be available/visible in a directory
structure, ie via a file browser, I thought the easiest way for them
to see if something existed would be to create a mirror of the
directory structure and then populate this dir structure with 1 - 5
byte files with the same name as the "real" data files that now
reside in the archive. I've seen some scripts on the interweb that
allow me to create the dir structure, but does anyone have any ideas
how to do the creation of the "marker" files in the active file
system?
Just buying more hard disks and keeping the data on line also
isn't an option.
Any thoughts, greatly appreciated,
Andrew
I don't understand why you specify 1-5 byte files. Those few bytes will
always be useless. Rather use 0-length files.
On the archive:
find /root/of/dir/structure -type d > dirs.txt
find /root/of/dir/structure -type f > files.txt
Copy those two files to the on-line system:
for I in `cat dirs.txt` ; do mkdir -p $I ; done
for I in `cat files.txt` ; do touch -p $I ; done
Do that in the appropriate top-level directory of course. You can
probably make it more efficient using decent options to xargs, but what
the hell, I'd do it as-is. It's a once off action and finding the xargs
man page will take longer than the mkdirs....
Gentlemen,
Thanks for the suggestions, worked like a charm. I did the above and
except for whitespaces, which shouldn't have been there in the first
place and "-", things went well. As to the reason for 1 - 5 bytes, I
forgot about zero length files.....
Andrew
