Printing the directory tree

Graphically representing directories and filesystems as a tree hierarchy is quite useful when preparing tutorials and documents. Also, they are sometimes useful in writing certain monitoring scripts that help to look at the filesystem using easy-to-read tree representations. Let us see how to do it.

Getting ready

The tree command is the hero that helps us to print graphical trees of files and directories. Usually, tree does not come with preinstalled Linux distributions. You have to install it using the package manager.

How to do it...

The following is a sample Unix filesystem tree to show an example:

$ tree ~/unixfs
unixfs/
|-- bin
|   |-- cat
|   `-- ls
|-- etc
|   `-- passwd
|-- home
|   |-- pactpub
|   |   |-- automate.sh
|   |   `-- schedule
|   `-- slynux
|-- opt
|-- tmp
`-- usr
8 directories, 5 files

The tree command comes with many interesting options, let us look at a few of them:

• To highlight only files matched by the pattern, use the following syntax:

  $...