Print indentations with whitespace only in tree command

Question

I want to list the subdirectories of a directory using tree command. But I don't want to print indentation lines. I only want to have the whitespaces instead.

I couldn't find the correct parameter in man page. Maybe I can pipe the output of tree to sed to remove the lines.

Answer 1

So you want something like this:

tree | sed 's/├\|─\|│\|└/ /g'

It replaces all those "line" characters with spaces.

---

See:

$ tree
.
├── dir1
│  ├── file1
│  └── file2
└── dir2
 ├── file1
 └── file2
2 directories, 4 files
$ tree | sed 's/├\|─\|│\|└/ /g'
.
 dir1
  file1
  file2
 dir2
 file1
 file2
2 directories, 4 files

• M. Justin: This sed expression does not appear to work in Mac OS X.
• Rishabh Deep Singh: Doesn't works for me as well
• Philippos: Was this meant to be extended regular expressions? Then it shiould be sed -E, but still the graphical characters seem wrong.

Answer 2

It works:

tree | sed -e 's/[├──└│]/ /g' 

• Jeff Schaller: This looks very similar to this answer by chaos; can you explain why yours is better?
• Philippos: @JeffSchaller Because this one actually works, I guess. This replaces each character in the collection with a whitespace, while the one of chaos seems to replace something that doesn't even appear in tree output.
• Jeff Schaller: Maybe the terminal representation changed, or something else changed in the intervening ... 5+ years. They just looked like very similar characters to me. Indeed, using my browser to search for each character, I find them matched between the answers.

Answer 3

You can simply add the -i flag to your tree command to not display the indentations. A bit simpler than piping to sed!

• M. Justin: It looks like the author is trying to have each line of output prefixed by whitespace, rather than e.g. ├── (though it's a bit ambiguously phrased). -i removes all prefixes, so you can't really tell what the tree structure is.
• Rishabh Deep Singh: This removes the folder names as well.

Answer 4

Another (sed-free) way would be

tree | iconv -f utf8 -c -t latin1 | tr '240円' ' '

Here I convert the output from utf8 to latin1 (i.e. ISO-8859-1, ASCII would be also an option but I want to preserve some "Umlauts"). The -c option of iconv "silently discards characters that cannot be converted". Lastly, I remove non-breaking spaces. This might not be relevant to you.

Caveat: you loose UTF-8 encoded chars if they cannot be converted to your target encoding.