CODEWITHSUNDEEP
linuxtreecommand-line-interface
Iacus
Iacus

Reputation: 59

Way to visualize as tree a list of paths?

I'd like to see a list of paths in a textfile as a tree in the command line.

I know about the tree utility in gnu/linux, but it seems to default to listing files in the filesystem. Is there a way to give it my list of paths from file so it builds its tree visualization from that instead?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 635

Answers (2)

SpinUp __ A Davis
SpinUp __ A Davis

Reputation: 5531

The tree utility takes the --fromfile argument, which can be used to pass file paths (one per line).

tree --fromfile /path/to/file.txt

To pass the list over stdin, use the '.' argument with fromfile.

find ...(args)... | tree --fromfile .

# or e.g. from an array variable
tree --fromfile . <<< $( printf '%s\n' "${an_array[@]}" )

Editing the Output

The annoying part about tree's output in this case is that it puts an extra '.' to represent the filename at the start. E.g.:

find . -type f -iname '*aa*.txt' | tree --fromfile .

.
└── .
    └── Food and Diet
        └── Bread
            └── Flatbreads, Naan, Focaccia.md.txt

4 directories, 1 file

If you're scripting this, you might want to edit the output a bit, e.g. to remove extra '.' and shift the subsequent lines to the left:

# adding -C to tree's arguments so it produces coloured output despite the pipe
find . -type f -iname '*aa*.txt' |
    tree -C --fromfile . |
    sed -E '1d; ${p;d}; s/....(.*)/\1/'

.
└── Food and Diet
    └── Bread
        └── Flatbreads, Naan, Focaccia.md.txt

4 directories, 1 file

Upvotes: 0

etsuhisa
etsuhisa

Reputation: 1758

Is the list of paths in the following format, like the output from the "find" command?

.
./aaa
./aaa/bbb
./aaa/ccc
./ddd
./ddd/eee

For example, using the "awk" command, I think you can get a format similar to the output of tree.

$ cat paths.txt | sort | awk '{n=split($0,a,/\//);for(i=1;i<n-1;i++)printf("|   ");if(n>1){printf("+-- ")}print a[n]}'

Upvotes: 3

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