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

Answer 1

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.