View Directories and Files in a Tree Structure

Table of Contents

Without using Tree package
By using Tree package
- How To View Directory Tree Structure In Linux

Without using Tree package

If the package “tree” is not installed in the computer

In a Linux computer,

find . | sed -e "s/[^-][^\/]*\// |/g" -e "s/|\([^ ]\)/|-\1/"

find . | sed -e "s/[^-][^\/]*\// |/g" -e "s/|\([^ ]\)/|-\1/" > output.txt

What is the difference between this command and running tree?

Tree preserves the order. So, if numerical or alphabetical order is important, installing tree is a good choice.

By using Tree package

How To View Directory Tree Structure In Linux

How to view directory structure using Tree command?

This command will display the contents of a directory in a tree-like format. You might wonder why on the earth someone would use this command whilst we already have ls command to list the contents of a directory. Unlike ls command, Tree command is a recursive directory listing program that produces a depth indented listing of files. It is quite useful to find the directories that contains lot of sub-directories in Unix-like systems.

Install Tree

Tree command is available in the default repositories of most Linux distributions. So, it can be installed from the distribution’s default package.

On Arch Linux and its derivatives: $ sudo pacman -S tree
On RHEL, CentOS, Fedora: $ sudo yum install tree Or, $ sudo dnf install tree
On SUSE/openSUSE: $ sudo zypper install tree
On Debian, Linux Mint, Ubuntu: $ sudo apt-get install tree

View Directory Tree Structure In Linux

Without any arguments

If you run the tree command without any arguments, the tree command will display all contents of the current working directory in a tree-like format.
```
$ tree
```
Upon completion of listing all files/directories found, tree returns the total number of files and/or directories listed. As you see in the above output, the current directory contains 3321 sub-directories, and 40023 files.

A specific directory

To list the files of the specific directory in a tree-like format, say for example /etc, run:
```
$ tree /etc/
```

Include hidden files

By default, Tree will not list the hidden files. If you want to list the hidden files, use -a parameter like below.
```
$ tree -a /etc/
```

View results in colored format

To view the directory structure in a colored format, use -C parameter.
```
$ tree -C /etc/
```
This is useful to easily distinguish the directories and files.

List only directories

As you may have noticed, all of the above commands lists the sub-directories and files. You can also list only the directories using -d parameter like below.
```
$ tree -d /etc/
```

Listing directories line by line

You can also display the directory listing line by line using the following command:
```
$ tree -d /etc/ | less
```

Limit the depth or level of recursion

By default, Tree command will list all sub-directories and the files inside the main directory. To limit the depth or of level of recursion, use -L parameter like below.
```
$ tree -L 2 /etc
```
Here, L indicates the maximum display depth of the directory tree.

Options
1. /A - Specifies that alternative characters (plus signs, hyphens, and vertical bars) be used to draw the tree diagram so that it can be printed by printers that don’t support the line-drawing and box-drawing characters (DOS Versions 4 and 5).
2. /F - Displays the names of the files found within each directory listed.

Documentation

For more details, refer the man pages.
```
$ man tree
```

In Windows machines

$ tree /a /f > Catalog.txt

Conclusion

As you can see in this guide, tree command will give you a nice graphical tree view of the directory structure. You can use this command when you want to view the contents of directories that have tons of other files/folders nested inside their folders.