How to generate an ASCII representation of a Unix file hierarchy?

Posted by Jenn D. on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Jenn D.
Published on 2010-05-21T00:58:03Z Indexed on 2010/05/21 1:02 UTC
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Hi, all. I'm looking for a quick and dirty way to generate some diagrams of some directories that have almost, but not exactly, the same hierarchy, so I can show them around at a meeting and we can decide which flavor we like best. I'm not interested in the "leaf" nodes, just the directories.

The catch: I don't want to mess with X. This is a server system I deal with entirely through SSH. So I'm looking for something that will do ASCII layout, maybe with simple pipes-and-hyphens for lines or something.

Does anyone know of such a utility? I'm sure I could write something myself, but it's such a fiddly little sort of project, with handling spacing and layout and such; I'd really like to discover that someone's done it for me. Alas, Google doesn't seem to know of such a thing...or if it does, it's hidden beneath heaps of excellent visual explications of the standard general Unix file hierarchy. Thanks!

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