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Mac

Fix garbled output of the tree command on macOS

Recently I had the need to produce a text file containing the directory structure of a folder and all its content.
The tree command is just what I needed. A quick brew install tree installed it on my Mac.

One would think that it would just be a matter of running

tree /path/to/folder > /path/to/tree.txt

That’s true, for small directories (or those with no special characters?), for others I get this lovely crap:

Screwed up oupput of the tree command on macOS

Turns out the fix is pretty easy (altough you loose non ASCII characters in file names):

LC_ALL=C tree /path/to/folder > /path/to/tree.txt