Seeing the forest with tree
In Full View

The tree command can provide a clear view of all your files and directories and offers a few advantages over the usual ls command.
The tree
command [1] is a tool that I'd overlooked until recently. After trying it for several weeks, however, I am starting to prefer its tree-like display of directories and files to the plain lists generated by ls
.
Part of the reason is that, in these GUI-oriented days, even a directory tree made with ASCII characters is more comfortable than no structural display at all. The functional differences between tree
and ls
are minimal. The two commands share a few options, such as -a
for displaying all files, and even when the options are different, the functionality remains similar. The largest exception I have noticed is that ls
offers an option for the number of columns in which to display results; the tree
display makes a single column unavoidable.
You have to look closely to see the differences, but tree
is consistently more versatile, starting with, unlike ls
, recursion. By default, tree
displays all files in all subdirectories.
[...]
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