Aral Balkan

tree is a command-line utility that displays a graphical (well, ASCII-art) directory tree. I saw Scott Chacon using it in his GitCasts and tried it in Terminal on OS X only to see that it wasn't installed. One quick sudo port install tree with MacPorts later, it was.

It's really useful for getting a quick idea of the state of a folder hierarchy. Highly recommended!

Comments

• Nathan, just used Terminal to "find" a directory -- thankyou thankyou thankyou. So simple. So useful. So needed so often for so long. Thank you.

  by ardobbs on 2008-12-24 19:29:06

• Hmm...my comment was sanitised unexpectedly. If you call "find" with a directory as the first and only argument, you'll get a much more useful result.

  by Nathan de Vries on 2008-12-23 00:28:26

• I used to use "tree" quite a bit before I realised that "find " provides the same visual overview of a directory's hierarchy, but also allows you to grep and copy-paste the full path of files.

  by Nathan de Vries on 2008-12-23 00:26:23