Want to make a structured list of my filesystem

unholy · 09-21-2006, 05:18 PM

I want to send a list of the contents of my home folder to a friend. Since this stuff has a 'tree' type heirarchy, I thought an xml file would be the best way to represent my filesystem. Each directory could be collapsable and the entries at each node could be my files.

Is there a utility to do this, or something else that will give the same result. I just want him to be able to see the contents of my filesystem from what ever pc I mail him this attachment to.

Thanks for reading!

unholy

Vgui · 09-21-2006, 05:35 PM

As a base you can use either:

Code:

ls -lR /home/whoever/
tree /home/whoever/

Mix up the switches as needed. You could pipe it into a file, and write a script to wrap each line in xml as needed, or just pass it around as a text file.

unholy · 09-21-2006, 05:56 PM

Thanks Vgui, that did the job. I don't know how to get as far as putting that output to xml, but the tree view will do.

Regards,
unholy

Vgui · 09-21-2006, 06:11 PM

Glad to hear it.
Outputting to xml would basically just be a script that loops through the tree output and wraps it in tags. The problem is I'm not sure what tags you would use, or what header info would be needed to make it a valid xml file.
Another option would be just plain html, again wrapping it in tags (maybe an unordered list, or a table).

Just dumping it to a file is probably easiest though

unholy · 09-21-2006, 06:20 PM

Yeah, I think I'll just stick with the text file for the sake of simplicity. I'll let my mate do the refining if he likes

Thanks again,
unholy

bigrigdriver · 09-21-2006, 06:24 PM

Take the output of ls -lR /home/whoever/ and pipe it through tee to get a text file:
ls -lR /home/whoever/ | tee tree.txt.

Then, enscript --language=html --output=tree.html tree.txt, to make a html out of the text file.

It still doesn't expand/collapse, but it gets part of the job done.

There are open source tools around to convert html to xml.