ddir: Echoes of tree

If you’ve taken a look at the old blog in the last day or so, you’ll know that I’m closing up shop at the end of the month.

The long and boring explanation is over there; the short and snappy one is here: It’s been a decade since I started writing out my Linux experiences there, and two and a half years of chasing down console software here — a lot more than I anticipated on either side.

Suffice to say it’s time for me to move on to new things. I’m also putting an end to the name, so if someone offers you advice in the future and calls themselves “K.Mandla,” it’s not me. 😕

For today, I have ddir to show. It’s not terribly beautiful, but I think you will see its usefulness.

I’ve known about ddir for a while, but to be honest, whenever I’ve needed something like ddir, I just grabbed tree (which I see now is listed nowhere on this site. 😡 ) They are very similar, as I’m sure you’ll admit.

And given that ddir seems to only offer ASCII characters as output, tree offers a small visual improvement. True, it’s the difference between 1982 and 1983 in console graphics, but it’s there.

ddir’s “help” flag will spit out its man page if you ask, and its few options are there for your perusal. Probably of most interest is the -d flag, which will prune the output (get it? prune? tree? $:\$ ) to directories only.

ddir is a basic tool and probably something an introductory-level CS student could replicate on a Saturday night as a party trick, but you can probably see a few uses for it. It’s in Debian as just “ddir,” but I don’t see it anywhere in Arch.

And the obvious post for tomorrow will be … tree. 🙄

10 thoughts on “ddir: Echoes of tree”

chris-l 2015/04/12 at 12:16 pm

So you are also closing this site too? Are you abandoning the console, and moving to GUI-only apps?

K.Mandla Post author2015/04/13 at 5:46 am

Yes, I’m going to step away from this entirely. I’ll lock up both sites, and turn off commenting just to stop spam.

As far as switching … probably not. I still use text-based applications at a majority, and I think switching to graphical ones would be a pain. Funny how that sounds, when I say it out loud. … 😉
1. chris-l 2015/04/13 at 2:20 pm
  
  You gave several arguments in your other site that make sense (except for one thing that I’m going to comment there) about closing THAT site. But they really don’t apply to THIS site. Even if you got bored of doing one app-a-day, and the concept of “old computer” has changed, that doesn’t really count as a reason to stop using console apps.
  
  And if you use console apps, even if you aren’t daily testing new ones, every once in a while you’ll find one that you’ll want to share. And I think that is a good enough reason to continue this site. In such scenario you would only write new entries less often. Unless of course, if you are going to dump the console altogether, that certainly is a reason to close this site. (Like a blog I used to read about vim tricks. The guy close it, because he moved to textmate )
  
  But don’t take me wrong, this ones are your sites, and your life is yours. And well, I have to say that I had a good time reading!
  Thank you!