A simple directory-tree printer in Ruby

Posted on 6/6/2007 by dru

The other day, I came across this interesting post by Tom Moertel. The blog post is called “A simple directory-tree printer in Haskell”. Haskell is interesting and this kind of programming exercise would really show how Haskell deals with real-world resources (the filesystem) as well as rendering the output in a nice human readable representation.

Here is some sample output:

.
|-- haskell.hs
|-- test.rb
|-- tree.rb
`-- tree.rb.html

His post was well written and I really liked how concise the resulting Haskell code was. I also liked the way he dealt with tree printing. I had never seen a tree printer algorithm like this before since I’m used to graphical versions which generally end up having a lot more code. For example, if I was doing this, I would have built a generic tree printer class and passed a lot more state around to each node (like the depth, sibling count, layout algorithms, etc.) Tom’s method is a great little pattern for console style tree output (like pstree) with only a few lines of code. For some past projects, such a simple routine would have come in handy.

So last night, I wondered what the Ruby version would look like. I tried to keep the example in the same functional style… just like his first example. The Ruby code stayed pretty concise.

Here is my Ruby version of Tom’s Haskell version:

 1 
 2 require 'pathname'
 3 

 4 $ArmMap = Hash.new("|   ")
 5 $ArmMap[""] = ""

 6 $ArmMap["`"] = "    "
 7 
 8 def visit(path, leader, tie, arm, node)

 9   print "#{leader}#{arm}#{tie}#{node}\n"

10   visitChildren(path + node, leader + $ArmMap[arm])

11 end
12 
13 def visitChildren(path, leader)

14   return unless FileTest.directory? path
15   return unless FileTest.readable? path

16   files = path.children(false).sort    #false = return name, not full path

17   return if files.empty?
18 
19   arms = Array.new(files.length - 1, "|") << "`"

20   pairs = files.zip(arms)
21   pairs.each { |e|  visit(path, leader, "-- ", e[1], e[0]) } 

22 end
23 
24 ARGV << "." if ARGV.empty?

25 ARGV.map{ |path| visit Pathname.new("."), "","","",Pathname.new(path) }

26 
27
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One Response to A simple directory-tree printer in Ruby

  1. RousseauAlexandre says:
    2/8/2017 at 7:23 am

    A simple amelioration if you want to include this script in your Rakefile. Then you simply to :

    • rake tree[“/home/arousseau/www”] to get a complete tree
    • rake tree[“/home/arousseau/www”, true] to get a tree with only folder

    require ‘pathname’

    desc “Print directory-tree” task :tree, [:folder, :folderonly] do |t, args| args.withdefaults(:folder_only => false)

    $folderonly = args.folderonly == “true”

    $ArmMap = Hash.new(“| “) $ArmMap[“”] = “” $ArmMap[“`”] = ” “

    def visit path, leader, tie, arm, node print(“#{leader}#{arm}#{tie}#{node}n”) if $folder_only and File.directory?(path+node) visitChildren(path + node, leader + $ArmMap[arm]) end

    def visitChildren path, leader return unless FileTest.directory? path return unless FileTest.readable? path files = path.children(false).sort #false = return name, not full path return if files.empty?

    arms = Array.new(files.length - 1, "|") << "`"
pairs = files.zip(arms)
pairs.each { |e|  visit(path, leader, "-- ", e[1], e[0]) }

    end

    visit Pathname.new(“.”), “”,””,””,Pathname.new(args.folder) end

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