Tree

Tree is a recursive directory listing command that produces a depth indented listing of files

This assignment is to re-create the tree command, using Python.

Functionality

To play around with the actual tree command, you will need to install it within your virtual machine:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install tree

While the actual tree command accepts a bunch of optional flags/options, we are only going to worry about the basic use cases:

• Passing in a path as the first/only argument

  $ tree examples/simple/
  examples/simple/
  ├── another
  ├── bites
  │   ├── dust
  │   │   └── dot.jpg
  │   └── the
  └── one.txt
  
  2 directories, 4 files
  

• Not passing in any arguments, which will display the contents of the working directory

  $ cd examples/simple/
  $ tree
  .
  ├── another
  ├── bites
  │   ├── dust
  │   │   └── dot.jpg
  │   └── the
  └── one.txt
  
  2 directories, 4 files
  

Your script should produce identical output, but run with

./pytree.py [path]
# which is equivalent to
python3 pytree.py [path]

Requirements

• Put your code into pytree.py
• pytest tests passing (90% total)
• Code Climate checks passing (10%)
• All of the logic must exist in Python. In other words, you may not use any of the following modules/functions:
  • os.popen()
  • os.spawn*()
  • os.system()
  • subprocess

Dealing with unicode

tree uses some unicode characters to create the layout and draw the lines. This includes non-breaking spaces (tested with tree v1.7.0), highlighted below:

Working with unicode/encodings can be challenging, but in short, we recommend copying-and-pasting the special characters directly from the tree output in your terminal to strings in your Python script.

• More information about unicode in Python
• A useful site for looking up unicode values
  • You can paste unicode characters directly in the search box to learn their corresponding name and values

Running tests locally

Run the following from this directory:

# install dependencies
sudo apt update
sudo apt install tree
pip3 install -r requirements.txt
# run the pytests
pytest -v
# run the pep8 checks
pep8

Code Climate checks

If you want to try running these locally:

1. Install Docker (follow the "Ubuntu Xenial 16.04 (LTS)" instructions)
2. Run the Code Climate CLI.

Note that this is advanced, so don't worry if you have trouble getting it running.