inamerrata

Possibly my longest blog post title ever?

Anyway, here’s a link to today’s little bit of scripting. I’ve now written this script three or four times, so I figure that means it’s useful and maybe worth keeping around. I’m calling it dir2tree and all it does is take a (sorted) list of pathnames and convert it into a tree structure. So, eg:

$ dpkg -L samba | grep man.*gz
/usr/share/man/man8/mksmbpasswd.8.gz
/usr/share/man/man8/eventlogadm.8.gz
/usr/share/man/man8/tdbbackup.8.gz
/usr/share/man/man8/pdbedit.8.gz
/usr/share/man/man8/smbd.8.gz
/usr/share/man/man8/nmbd.8.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/smbstatus.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/profiles.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/smbcontrol.1.gz

becomes

$ dpkg -L samba | grep man.*gz | sort | dir2tree
/
	usr/
		share/
			man/
				man1/
					profiles.1.gz
					smbcontrol.1.gz
					smbstatus.1.gz
				man8/
					eventlogadm.8.gz
					mksmbpasswd.8.gz
					nmbd.8.gz
					pdbedit.8.gz
					smbd.8.gz
					tdbbackup.8.gz

So yeah. There you go.

(A related useful tool is tree, which generates a prettier tree and does the directory walking itself. I wanted something that I could use with find, and I couldn’t spot anything that already existed.)