Oracle Linux – short tip #3 – showing a directory tree

When navigating the Oracle Linux file system is sometimes is more comfortable as a human to see a directory tree structure in one view opposed to a "flat" view. People using a graphical user interface under Linux or Windows are commonly used to see a tree view of the directories they are navigating. Having the tree view makes sense and is more easy to read in some cases. By default Oracle Linux is not providing a feature for this on the command line, this is because the basic installation is is baed upon a minimalism installation for all good reasons. However the tree option is available and can be installed using yum and the standard Oracle Linux YUM repository.

Installation can be done with;

yum install tree

As soon as tree is installed you can use this option to show you a tree representation of the file system. For example, if you would use ls on a specific directory you would see something like in the example below;

[root@localhost input]# ls
by-id  by-path  event0  event1  event2  event3  event4  event5  event6  mice  mouse0  mouse1
[root@localhost input]#

If we execute the tree command in the same location we will see a more deep dive tree representation of the same directory and all underlying directories which makes it much more quicker to understand the layout of the directory structure and navigate it. In the example below you see the representation made available via the tree command.

[root@localhost input]# tree
.
├── by-id
│   ├── usb-VirtualBox_USB_Tablet-event-joystick -> ../event5
│   └── usb-VirtualBox_USB_Tablet-joystick -> ../mouse1
├── by-path
│   ├── pci-0000:00:06.0-usb-0:1:1.0-event-joystick -> ../event5
│   ├── pci-0000:00:06.0-usb-0:1:1.0-joystick -> ../mouse1
│   ├── platform-i8042-serio-0-event-kbd -> ../event2
│   ├── platform-i8042-serio-1-event-mouse -> ../event3
│   ├── platform-i8042-serio-1-mouse -> ../mouse0
│   └── platform-pcspkr-event-spkr -> ../event6
├── event0
├── event1
├── event2
├── event3
├── event4
├── event5
├── event6
├── mice
├── mouse0
└── mouse1

As you can see, using tree is making it much faster to understand the layout of the directory structure opposed to using for example ls and diving manually into the different directories while using Oracle Linux.