My professor sent us this little one liner (ok, I had to format it to 2 lines to fit in this blog. You know what I mean) which prints out the current directory tree:

ls -R | grep ":$" | sed -e 's/:$//' -e 's/[^-][^\/]*\//--/g' \
-e 's/^/ /' -e 's/-/|/'

What’s going on here?

  • ls -R — list files and directories recursively
  • grep ":$" — find lines with : at the end (so only the directories)
  • sed -e — evaluate expressions on the lines
  • s/:$// — remove ‘:’ at the end of the line
  • s/[^-][^\/]*\//--/g — replaces text between / / lines (parent directories) with — , globally on each line
  • s/^/ / — add space at the beginning of the lines
  • s/-/|/ — replace first – of the line with |

I reduced this using the following command. The most notable difference is that I use find instead of ls, which results in also viewing .hidden directories. I’m not sure which command is faster.

find ./ -type d | sed -e 's/[^-][^\/]*\//--/g;s/--/ |-/'

Both commands result in a formatted directory listing, demonstrated below:

|-sitetransfer
 |---redacteddomain.com
 |-----cache
 |-----templates
 |-------skidoo_too
 |---------images
 |-----------_vti_cnf
 |---------css
 |-----------_vti_cnf
 |---------js
 |-----------scriptaculous
 |-------------src
 |-------------lib
 |---------admin_templates
5 comments
  1. Pingback: Dave Drager
  2. Pingback: GeekLad
  3. Pingback: Karl Gechlik

Comments are closed.

You May Also Like

Set Operations Using Bash Commands

Found a great post over at good coders code, great reuse. This…

Attach files to email via command line

This is a pretty simple thing to do, once you’ve figured it…

Printing to a shared printer from DOS

If you or your client is using an old-DOS based program to…

How to Turn PHP into an RPM The Easy Way with FPM

So you have a custom PHP binary that you wish to distribute…