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Is there an alternative to tree command (or some way using the tree command itself) to print the directory structure horizontally?

Quite often, I have a tree structure, for which I have to scroll a lot. If it were printed horizontally, no scrolling would be required.

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    If you have to scroll "a lot", this implies a large directory structure. How would this fit better horizontally? Commented Apr 6, 2020 at 11:26
  • I have just discovered that the world has almost forgotten Martin Schmidt's 1988 rot command. Commented Apr 6, 2020 at 13:24
  • @Kusalananda : Yes. That makes sense. Actually, what I had in mind was a hybrid display, where the parents are spread horizontally and their children vertically. That would be the optimal display. Commented Apr 6, 2020 at 13:30
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    @JdeBP : Can you share some link for the rot command? Commented Apr 6, 2020 at 13:32
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    @Kusalananda a file structure which is rather deep than broad. Something you can create with perl -nle 'mkdir $_ and chdir $_ or die' /usr/share/dict/words (think twice before running that ;-)) Commented Apr 6, 2020 at 16:32

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As opaquely referenced by @JdeBP above, there's a utility entitled rot, available as a tar.Z file from ugu.com. Similarly transformative as tac(1) and rev(1) are, rot(1) will rotate lines to become columns.

$ tree --charset=ascii --noreport | rot -or | sed 's/./& /g; y/`|-/++|/';
. + + + + 
  | | | | 
  | | | | 

  M r r r 
  a o o o 
  k t t t 
  e   . . 
  f   c m 
  i     a 
  l     n 
  e 
$
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  • It won't work for UTF-8 though (the source is older than UTF-8). Commented Jun 28, 2020 at 15:40

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