What is a good tool to export a directory structure?

Question

Is there any good tool that I can use to get a browsable tree-view of the directory structure of a partition? Something like the tree view in the windows explorer. Additionally, I need to be able to export that file-list, so that others can view it without access to the partition.

Edit To clairify, I am not interested in the files themselves. I just need a hierarchical listing of all files. Zipping them all up is not what I want.

Answer 1

Assuming your directory tree is of reasonable size, you could also use the built in tree command, which produces a rather pretty looking directory tree. Unfortunately this prettiness is difficult to get working outside of a cmd instance, so you'll probably want to tell it to just use ascii characters with the /A switch.

Example:

From a small multi-level structure

+---A
|   +---A
|   \---B
+---B
|   \---A
|       \---A
\---C

You can then redirect this to a file using a command like:

tree /A ["directory path"] > tree.txt

Where the directory path is optional, but useful if you want to tree something which isn't the current working directory.

Answer 2

If you want to use powershell the code is very simple and the output is nice.

Code:

Get-ChildItem | tree

With

Get-ChildItem | tree > foo.txt

you can pipe the output to a Textfile.

Example Output:

Auflistung der Ordnerpfade für Volume System
Volumeseriennummer : 48E9-F43B
C:.
├───Contacts
├───Desktop
├───Downloads
│   └───Evernote Import
├───Dropbox
│   ├───Apps
│   │   └───iftttcom
│   │       └───getpocketpdf
│   ├───Backup
│   ├───Camera Uploads
│   ├───Development

Answer 3

If raw text as the output is fine, then you can run the following from a command prompt:

DIR C:\ /S > output.txt

Where output.txt will be generated in the current working directory, and contain a listing of all files and directories on the C: drive. If you want just a full output of files with their paths, run the following:

DIR C:\ /B /S > output.txt

_{It would also be a trivial task to write a program to parse the output back into a directory view style program for you to view.}

Answer 4

Although this has already been answered, I came looking here for the solution, but didn't find it.

Looking further, I found this : http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/tree.htm

With that I can follow the instructions of http://nsaunders.wordpress.com/2010/11/16/dropbox-tip-continued-convert-a-file-tree-to-html/ , and create a HTML tree of my Dropbox public folder, and in that way share a directory tree very easy.

Answer 5

Use the following powershell command, also remember that you can export it to Xml, csv or to database. Also I have restricted properties to full name and name, you can use other properties like modified timestamp etc.

Get-ChildItem -Recurse 'Z:\temp' *.xml | Select-Object -Property FullName,name | Export-Csv directory_structure.csv

Answer 6

You could just use xcopy with the /T and /E option to copy only directories. That would get you a complete and browsable copy of the structure, and answers the first part of your question. Does not let you view files though...

Answer 7

You could use an archiving tool, such as WinZIP that can zip an entire directory structure into a single file, that you can, for example, transfer on a network, or put on a USB disk. Some tools will also keep flags such as read-only, archive, etc.

Under Linux, my favorite tool for such action is tar, that will take an entire directory structure into a single file, which I can couple with gzip to actually compress the whole thing.