Creating deep symlink

Question

Some python packages has the following structure: python code in /usr/shared/pyshared/lib_name and symlinks on python sources in /usr/lib/python2.x/dist-packages/lib_name. However, lib_name in /usr/lib is not a symlink itself. Instead the directory tree of pyshared/lib_name is deeply copied and every single file is symlinked.

I want to reproduce this behavior. Given a directory tree I want to make a deep symlink copy of it. Of course it can be done with a simple script with find command, but maybe it can be achieved in a more standard way?

P.S. Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty, if it matters.

Answer 1

Depending on what exactly you're trying to accomplish, you might want to consider GNU Stow - it's designed to act as basically a package manager for things built from scratch, and it works by creating symlinks of the sort you're describing from each package's unshared build directory to a common deployment directory.

It should be able to do what you're asking for, and you'll particularly be interested in the --no-folding option, which makes it create directories and symlink files, instead of its default behavior of symlinking directories directly when only one package refers to them.