Print indentations with whitespace only in tree command

Question

I want to list the subdirectories of a directory using tree command. But I don't want to print indentation lines. I only want to have the whitespaces instead.

I couldn't find the correct parameter in man page. Maybe I can pipe the output of tree to sed to remove the lines.

score 8 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 25 '15 at 13:56

8

So you want something like this:

tree | sed 's/├\|─\|│\|└/ /g'

It replaces all those "line" characters with spaces.

See:

$ tree
.
├── dir1
│   ├── file1
│   └── file2
└── dir2
    ├── file1
    └── file2

2 directories, 4 files
$ tree | sed 's/├\|─\|│\|└/ /g'
.
    dir1
        file1
        file2
    dir2
        file1
        file2

2 directories, 4 files

answered Nov 25 '15 at 13:56

chaos

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This `sed` expression does not appear to work in Mac OS X. – M. Justin Oct 04 '17 at 15:33
Doesn't works for me as well – Rishabh Deep Singh Aug 02 '20 at 00:44
Was this meant to be extended regular expressions? Then it shiould be `sed -E`, but still the graphical characters seem wrong. – Philippos Aug 19 '21 at 15:49

smallyu · Answer 2 · 2021-08-19T09:47:27.463

3

It works:

tree | sed -e 's/[├──└│]/ /g'

edited Aug 19 '21 at 09:47

answered Aug 19 '21 at 09:39

smallyu

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2

This looks very similar to [this answer](https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/245416/117549) by chaos; can you explain why yours is better? – Jeff Schaller Aug 19 '21 at 10:56
@JeffSchaller Because this one actually works, I guess. This replaces each character in the collection with a whitespace, while the one of chaos seems to replace something that doesn't even appear in `tree` output. – Philippos Aug 19 '21 at 15:52
Maybe the terminal representation changed, or something else changed in the intervening ... 5+ years. They just looked like very similar characters to me. Indeed, using my browser to search for each character, I find them matched between the answers. – Jeff Schaller Aug 19 '21 at 15:54

score 0 · Answer 3 · edited May 02 '16 at 18:15

0

You can simply add the -i flag to your tree command to not display the indentations. A bit simpler than piping to sed!

edited May 02 '16 at 18:15

guido

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answered May 02 '16 at 17:58

Jamie Rasmussen

9
1

2

It looks like the author is trying to have each line of output prefixed by whitespace, rather than e.g. `├──` (though it's a bit ambiguously phrased). `-i` removes all prefixes, so you can't really tell what the tree structure is. – M. Justin Oct 04 '17 at 15:28
This removes the folder names as well. – Rishabh Deep Singh Aug 02 '20 at 00:44

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered May 01 '23 at 20:31

Another (sed-free) way would be

tree | iconv -f utf8 -c -t latin1 | tr '\240' ' '

Here I convert the output from utf8 to latin1 (i.e. ISO-8859-1, ASCII would be also an option but I want to preserve some "Umlauts"). The -c option of iconv "silently discards characters that cannot be converted". Lastly, I remove non-breaking spaces. This might not be relevant to you.

Caveat: you loose UTF-8 encoded chars if they cannot be converted to your target encoding.

Print indentations with whitespace only in tree command

4 Answers4