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Command Line Display of a Folder Tree

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If you have ever needed to print out a folder hierarchy in Windows this is for you. Go to the command line (Start > Run > cmd), traverse to the folder you want to list out (ie: cd c:/reallysweetfolder/) and type tree.
Your view will look something like this:

├───Browsers
│   ├───Minefield
│   ├───Mozilla Firefox
│   ├───Mozilla Firefox 2 Beta 2
│   └───Other
│       ├───Mozilla Firefox
│       ├───Netscape4
│       └───Opera

Now, of course you’d want to throw in some options (display files in the folders and list it out in ASCII characters) and export this to a text file right? Well, just type:

tree /f /a >c:/myFolderList.txt

Here’s the help for reference:

Graphically displays the folder structure of a drive or path.
TREE [drive:][path] [/F] [/A]

/F Display the names of the files in each folder.
/A Use ASCII instead of extended characters.

Author: Dirk Watkins

Dirk Watkins was born in Door County. He studied computer science and art at Carroll College in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Dirk now works as a web application developer in Milwaukee programming mostly in c#, javascript, sql queries and the occasional actionscript. For design he likes to utilize as much css (positioning and styles) as possible. Dirk uses Dreamweaver, Visual Studio 2005, Flash and Photoshop daily and lots of other random programs frequently. In his spare time Dirk plays guitar, reads, listens to NPR, works on his house, and sleeps on quiet beaches.

One Comment

  1. You can also get a quick list of files in a folder and output the results to a text file with this command:

    dir /b > c:\output.csv

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