Keep some folders, but dump the files
 

I'm using an external FW800 drive as my boot drive for my MacBookPro when I'm in my office. Much faster and larger than my internal drive.

I want to have a current subset of the files on the external drive to be cloned onto my internal drive for when I have to do a field visit.

I understand about how to ignore folders so that I won't end up with copies of my movies, working projects or other unprocessed downloads, but I still want SD to copy an empty folder as a place holder to the clone.

I just did my first clone with Leopard and everything worked great. Bootable on the internal drive. But my downloads, movies, and other folders that I excluded are not on the clone, which creates problems when other programs reference a folder that's not on the clone.

I used Script Commands like ignore: Users/*/Movies/

Should I be putting a wild card * or .* after the trailing / to keep the folder but drop the files.

Yes, to copy the folder but not the contents you would need to add a wild card to the path. If you don't want invisible files (.DS_Store, .Trash etc…) to be copied too then you would also add the dot wild card as well.

You want your paths to be like this:

Visible files: Users/*/Movies/*
Invisible files: Users/*/Movies/.*