Get a nice directory overview in the shell with tree

Tired of typing cd and ls? With the tree command you get a very nice tree overview of the content of a directory, its files and subdirectories. The output is even colorized according to the object type. On the distributions I know (Gentoo, Debian and openSUSE) it is not installed per default.

Print a tree of the files in the current directory and all subdirectories.

tree

Print also hidden files.

tree -a

List directories only.

tree -d

Print the full path for each directory and file starting from the current working directory.

tree -f

Print the full path for each directory and file starting from the current working directory But print all found objects as a list instead of a tree (no indention).

tree -fi

Display more details: permissions, user name and group name.

tree -pug

Add inode and device numbers to the output.

tree --inodes --device

With -L you can control the depth of the descent into the directory structure. Print only the content of the current directory.

tree -L 1

Print only the content of the current directory and the first level of subdirectories.

tree -L 2

Save output in a file.

tree -o output.txt

With -A you get a nicer indention, here is an example:

tree -Apug -L 2