Niklas Tech Blog

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:

#!/bin/bash
olddir=$PWD;
declare -i dirdepth=0;
function listfiles {
        cd "$1";
        for file in *
        do
                for ((i=0; $i < $dirdepth; i++))
                do
                        ##Tab between each level
                        printf "\t";
                done
                ## Print directories with brackets ([directory])
                if [ -d "$file" ]
                then
                        printf "\1[$file]\n";
                else
                        printf "$file\e[0m\n";
                fi

                ##Work our way thru the system recursively
                if [ -d "$file" ]
                then
                        dirdepth=$dirdepth+1;
                        listfiles "$file";
                        cd ..;
                fi
        done
        ##Done with this directory - moving on to next file
        let dirdepth=$dirdepth-1;
}
listfiles "$1";
##Go back to where we started
cd $olddir;
unset 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)