Bash – What tool to use to draw file tree diagram

bashdiagramfilesystemsshell

Given a file tree – a directory with directories in it etc, how would you write a script to create a diagram of the file-tree as a graphic file that I can embed in a word processor document.
I prefer vector (SVG, EPS, EMF…) files.
The tool must run on Windows, but preferably cross-platform.
The tool may be commercial but preferably free.

Update 2012-02-20.
The question was related to a documentation sub project. I had to explan where files (in particular resources and configuration files) reside.
I ended up with using dos tree command. I both screen grabbed the result (for short folders) AND for longer folders I redirected to a text file, which I then edited. For example if a subfolder contained 20 similarly typed files that individually were not important to the point I was making, I left just two and replaced the rest with one … line. I then printed out the file to console again and screen grabbed it.
Before screen grabbing I had to modify foreground color to black and background color to white, to look better and save ink in a document should that be printed.

It is very surprising that there is no better tool for it. If I had time, I'd write a Visio Extension or may be some command line that produces SVG. SVG being HTML5 substandard, would even allow painless inclusion into online documentation.

Update 2017-10-17.
I am sorry that this question was removed as not belonging to SO. So I have re-worded it. I need a script – not a WYSIWYG tool. So any scripting language or library is ok. So it is a code – writing question, and I believe belongs to SO.

Best Solution

Copying and pasting from the MS-DOS tree command might also work for you. Examples:

tree

C:\Foobar>tree
C:.
├───FooScripts
├───barconfig
├───Baz
│   ├───BadBaz
│   └───Drop
...

tree /F

C:\Foobar>tree
C:.
├───FooScripts
│    foo.sh
├───barconfig
│    bar.xml
├───Baz
│   ├───BadBaz
│   │    badbaz.xml
│   └───Drop
...

tree /A

C:\Foobar>tree /A
C:.
+---FooScripts
+---barconfig
+---Baz
¦   +---BadBaz
¦   \---Drop
...

tree /F /A

C:\Foobar>tree /A
C:.
+---FooScripts
¦    foo.sh
+---barconfig
¦    bar.xml
+---Baz
¦   +---BadBaz
¦   ¦    badbaz.xml
¦   \---Drop
...

Syntax ^[source]

tree [drive:][path] [/F] [/A]

drive:\path — Drive and directory containing disk for display of directory structure, without listing files.

/F — Include all files living in every directory.

/A — Replace graphic characters used for linking lines with ext characters , instead of graphic characters. /a is used with code pages that do not support graphic characters and to send output to printers that do not properly interpret graphic characters.

Related Solutions

Bash tool to get nth line from a file

head and pipe with tail will be slow for a huge file. I would suggest sed like this:

sed 'NUMq;d' file

Where NUM is the number of the line you want to print; so, for example, sed '10q;d' file to print the 10th line of file.

Explanation:

NUMq will quit immediately when the line number is NUM.

d will delete the line instead of printing it; this is inhibited on the last line because the q causes the rest of the script to be skipped when quitting.

If you have NUM in a variable, you will want to use double quotes instead of single:

sed "${NUM}q;d" file

Bash – the use case of noop [:] in bash

It's there more for historical reasons. The colon builtin : is exactly equivalent to true. It's traditional to use true when the return value is important, for example in an infinite loop:

while true; do
  echo 'Going on forever'
done

It's traditional to use : when the shell syntax requires a command but you have nothing to do.

while keep_waiting; do
  : # busy-wait
done

The : builtin dates all the way back to the Thompson shell, it was present in Unix v6. : was a label indicator for the Thompson shell's goto statement. The label could be any text, so : doubled up as a comment indicator (if there is no goto comment, then : comment is effectively a comment). The Bourne shell didn't have goto but kept :.

A common idiom that uses : is : ${var=VALUE}, which sets var to VALUE if it was unset and does nothing if var was already set. This construct only exists in the form of a variable substitution, and this variable substitution needs to be part of a command somehow: a no-op command serves nicely.