Bash script simulating the ‘tree’ command

Posted by on June 24, 2011

When trying to get to know a new system I really like the ‘tree‘ command. It gives me a fast and nice overview of the filesystem of the application. Sometimes I work on systems that does not have this great tool available and for those occasions I made this bash script:

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01#!/bin/bash
02olddir=$PWD;
03declare -i dirdepth=0;
04function listfiles {
05        cd "$1";
06        for file in *
07        do
08                for ((i=0; $i < $dirdepth; i++))
09                do
10                        ##Tab between each level
11                        printf "\t";
12                done
13                ## Print directories with brackets ([directory])
14                if [ -d "$file" ]
15                then
16                        printf "\1[$file]\n";
17                else
18                        printf "$file\e[0m\n";
19                fi
20 
21                ##Work our way thru the system recursively
22                if [ -d "$file" ]
23                then
24                        dirdepth=$dirdepth+1;
25                        listfiles "$file";
26                        cd ..;
27                fi
28        done
29        ##Done with this directory - moving on to next file
30        let dirdepth=$dirdepth-1;
31}
32listfiles "$1";
33##Go back to where we started
34cd $olddir;
35unset i dirdepth;

To use the script just do the following:

  1. Create a new file called 'tree.sh' (or whatever you like)
  2. Paste the code into the file and save
  3. Make the file executable
  4. Run the file: . tree.sh

This script is tested on OSX 10.6.8, Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS release 3 (Taroon Update 9)

Linux

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