Workbook on Digital Private Papers > Surveying collections
Capturing directory structures
Introduction
Capturing the directory structure of an archive creates a record of the orginal order of digital materials accessioned by the repository. This can be achieved using screenshots, but generating a textual file allows the archivist to record all the information in one file that can be searched.
Capturing a directory tree in Microsoft Windows XP
Select Run from the Start menu
Type cmd into the dialogue box and click OK.
In the 'cmd' terminal type tree pathordirectory /a specifying the directory for which you'd like to generate a tree e.g. tree c:\ /a would generate a tree for the c:/.
If you wanted to generate a tree, which included files as well as directories on the c:\, you would type tree c:\ /a /f and press return. Creating a directory tree for the entire c:\ can take some time, so you may prefer to specify a smaller section of the filesystem.
To output the results as a text file we need to append >myfilename.txt to the command:
The resulting text file is saved in the working directory, which is C:\Documents and Settings\susan in the example above. The text file generated by our example looks like this:
Capturing directory trees on Linux and Unix
- Open a terminal
- The command tree > tree.txt will list all subdirectories and files in the current working directory and output the result in a file named 'tree.txt' in the same directory.
- tree specifieddirectory will list all subdirectories and files in a specified directory.
In the following example we have asked for a tree of the deerpark directory to be placed on the user's Desktop:
The file is placed on the desktop:
This is what the output of the command looks like:
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