Mac OS X equivalent of the Ubuntu “tree” command

Question

Is there any equivalent of the Ubuntu tree command for Mac OS X ?

Answer 1

Yes, there is, and it's called tree.

You can install it

• from source, which could be problematic

• by using any package manager, like Homebrew, MacPorts, or Fink (sorted in the order I would recommend). Install either of those first — just install one, not all.

  Then run one of the following commands, depending on which package manager you chose.

  brew install tree
  sudo port install tree
  fink install tree
  

Answer 2

Hi: There isn't a tree command per se however you can do this:

Save the following script to /usr/local/bin/tree

#!/bin/bash

SEDMAGIC='s;[^/]*/;|____;g;s;____|; |;g'

if [ "$#" -gt 0 ] ; then
   dirlist="$@"
else
   dirlist="."
fi

for x in $dirlist; do
     find "$x" -print | sed -e "$SEDMAGIC"
done

chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/tree

and enjoy

Of course you may have to create /usr/local/bin

Answer 3

Or if your administrator won't let you install any of the brew, fink, port tools you can always build it from the source :

curl -O ftp://mama.indstate.edu/linux/tree/tree-1.5.3.tgz
tar xzvf tree-1.5.3.tgz
cd tree-1.5.3/
ls -al

Edit the Makefile to comment linux part and uncomment osx area:

# Linux defaults:
#CFLAGS=-ggdb -Wall -DLINUX -D_LARGEFILE64_SOURCE -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64
#CFLAGS=-O2 -Wall -fomit-frame-pointer -DLINUX -D_LARGEFILE64_SOURCE -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64
#LDFLAGS=-s

# Uncomment for OS X:
CC=cc
CFLAGS=-O2 -Wall -fomit-frame-pointer -no-cpp-precomp
LDFLAGS=
XOBJS=strverscmp.o

And while you're at it, if you want to force tree to always colorize the output, you can always edit the main method of the tree.c file and add force_color=TRUE before setLocale(LC_TYPE,"");

Finally hit make and you're done building tree for mac.

Tribute goes to Shaun Chapman for his original post on his blog.

Answer 4

An alternative using find and awk:

#!/bin/bash
find . -print 2>/dev/null | awk '!/\.$/ { \
    for (i=1; i<NF; i++) { \
        printf("%4s", "|") \
    } \
    print "-- "$NF \
}' FS='/'

Answer 5

It's not as pretty as gnu tree ... but it's real easy to alias in bash ... You can even add a little color by tacking the G option on to osx's ls color.

alias tree='find . -type d | ls -lARG'