Josh Sherman
The tree command is one of my favorites. As the name of the command suggests,
it simply lists the contents of a directory in a tree-like format.
Think of it like ls *, which outputs the contents of each directory, but
instead of a flat list, the files are shown with a cool little ASCII tree as
such:
/tmp/tree
% tree
.
├── one
│ ├── file1.txt
│ ├── file2.txt
│ └── file3.txt
├── three
│ ├── file1.txt
│ ├── file2.txt
│ └── file3.txt
└── two
├── file1.txt
├── file2.txt
└── file3.txt
3 directories, 9 files
While you can’t necessarily tell by looking at the output, there aren’t any
hidden files being shown. Generally speaking, that’s not a bad thing, especially
if you are using tree with noisy directory that has a ton of hidden files
(like your home directory).
If you did want to display hidden files, all you need to do is pass in the -a
flag, and that will tell tree to show all files:
/tmp/tree
% tree -a
.
├── .hiddenFile1.txt
├── .hiddenFile2.txt
├── .hiddenFile3.txt
├── one
│ ├── file1.txt
│ ├── file2.txt
│ └── file3.txt
├── three
│ ├── file1.txt
│ ├── file2.txt
│ └── file3.txt
└── two
├── file1.txt
├── file2.txt
└── file3.txt
3 directories, 12 files
