[lug] Tools to navigate Unix links backwards?

Vince Dean vincedean at frii.com
Fri Jul 23 16:37:12 MDT 2010


 On 7/23/2010 3:50 PM, Davide Del Vento wrote:
>>> Does "tree(1)" help you?
>> Yes -- that's just the sort of hint I was hoping for.  This will be
>> a generally useful tool.
> Mmmm, how does that help more than ls -l (on a modern linux, where
> colors and suffixes, and explicit arrows for syslinks, and the likes
> are available and turned on by default)?
It's a Unix tool that writes text output in a simple format.
The output with ASCII art is handy for including in documents and README
files.
Can select how many levels to list.
Identifies recursive symbolic links.
Optionally follows symbolic links.

Running a tool like this and either printing the results, or saving them
in a file
to review on-line, is a quick way to get an overview of the structure
and spot
patterns.  In the same way that it sometimes useful to print and mark up an
unfamiliar program.




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