How do I copy directory structure containing placeholders - bash

Question

I have the situation, where a template directory - containing files and links (!) - needs to be copied recursively to a destination directory, preserving all attributes. The template directory contains any number of placeholders (__NOTATION__), that need to be renamed to certain values.
For example template looks like this:
./template/__PLACEHOLDER__/name/__PLACEHOLDER__/prog/prefix___FILENAME___blah.txt
Destination becomes like this:
./destination/project1/name/project1/prog/prefix_customer_blah.txt
What I tried so far is this:
# first create dest directory structure
while read line; do
dest="$(echo "$line" | sed -e 's#__PLACEHOLDER__#project1#g' -e 's#__FILENAME__#customer#g' -e 's#template#destination#')"
if ! [ -d "$dest" ]; then
mkdir -p "$dest"
fi
done < <(find ./template -type d)
# now copy files
while read line; do
dest="$(echo "$line" | sed -e 's#__PLACEHOLDER__#project1#g' -e 's#__FILENAME__#customer#g' -e 's#template#destination#')"
cp -a "$line" "$dest"
done < <(find ./template -type f)
However, I realized that if I want to take care about permissions and links, this is going to be endless and very complicated. Is there a better way to replace __PLACEHOLDER__ with "value", maybe using cp, find or rsync?

Answer 1

I suspect that your script will already do what you want, if only you replace
find ./template -type f
with
find ./template ! -type d
Otherwise, the obvious solution is to use cp -a to make an "archive" copy of the template, complete with all links, permissions, etc, and then rename the placeholders in the copy.
cp -a ./template ./destination
while read path; do
dir=`dirname "$path"`
file=`basename "$path"`
mv -v "$path" "$dir/${file//__PLACEHOLDER__/project1}"
done < <(`find ./destination -depth -name '*__PLACEHOLDER__*'`)
Note that you'll want to use -depth or else renaming files inside renamed directories will break.
If it's very important to you that the directory tree is created with the names already changed (i.e. you must never see placeholders in the destination), then I'd recommend simply using an intermediate location.

Answer 2

First copy with rsync, preserving all the properties and links etc.
Then change the placeholder strings in the destination filenames:
#!/bin/bash
TEMPL="$PWD/template" # somewhere else
DEST="$PWD/dest" # wherever it is
mkdir "$DEST"
(cd "$TEMPL"; rsync -Hra . "$DEST") #
MyRen=$(mktemp)
trap "rm -f $MyRen" 0 1 2 3 13 15
cat >$MyRen <<'EOF'
#!/bin/bash
fn="$1"
newfn="$(echo "$fn" | sed -e 's#__PLACEHOLDER__#project1#g' -e s#__FILENAME__#customer#g' -e 's#template#destination#')"
test "$fn" != "$newfn" && mv "$fn" "$newfn"
EOF
chmod +x $MyRen
find "$DEST" -depth -execdir $MyRen {} \;