Putty and tree - how to avoid weird characters (squares)
Character encoding is always a problem when communicating between Windows and Linux. And using the "tree" command is affected by this problem if you are connected to a Linux box using Putty on a Windows box. You will certainly get weird characters, probably squares.
For those who are not sure about what tree is. It is a command-line tool to list contents of directories in a tree-like format.
A solution to this problem is to force using plain ASCII characters:
tree --charset=ASCII |
You can also have an alias for this command, so that every time you type "tree", it will force tree to use the ASCII charset automatically.
alias tree='tree --charset=ASCII' |
And this is an example of what you will get as an output:
/tmp |-- claws-mail-1000 |-- keyring-x803mg | |-- control | |-- pkcs11 | `-- ssh |-- orbit-gdm [error opening dir] `-- virtual-user |
Matt Stevens said
July 7 2011 @ 11:15 AM
Nice tip, thanks for putting this up!
'ls -R' doesn't cut it.
Jody said
July 13 2012 @ 10:20 AM
You can also change the character encoding in Putty. Settings -> Window -> Translation -> Remote Character Set. I used UTF-8
Harry said
September 2 2012 @ 5:27 PM
@Jody: Thx for that tip, this looks even better in Putty
Wolfgang Kucher said
April 26 2013 @ 4:57 AM
Thank You for the tip.
Saved me a lot of time.
Regards
Wolfgang