Error when running tree command

The tree command is a popular utility which lists the contents of a directory in a tree format, and it also allows users to specify the display depth of the directory tree. After installing the tree package in ubuntu, and running the tree command – I was getting below error:

$ tree .
sed: read error on .: Is a directory

The error doesn’t look like it is coming from the tree package just installed, after some digging I figured out that the “tree” command in this case was an alias. I use the Bash-it framework for a collection of bash commands and scripts and Bash-it has its own set of aliases including one for tree –

$ type tree
tree is aliased to `find . -print | sed -e 's;[^/]*/;|____;g;s;____|; |;g''

In order to run the actual tree command, I had to prefix it with “command” or “\” as below –

$ command tree .
.
??? chapter-one
??? readme

1 directory, 1 file

$ \tree .
.
??? chapter-one
??? readme

1 directory, 1 file

References –

http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/trusty/man1/tree.1.html

https://github.com/Bash-it/bash-it

Linux – how to avoid running an alias command in shell

In some cases, you might have multiple binaries, scripts or aliases with the same name in your system. Under certain circumstances you want to run only a built-in shell command, but no an alias of the command. Here are some ways to do it.

The “ls” command is usually aliased to color the output, for instance –

$ type ls
ls is aliased to `ls --color=auto'

Precede the command with “command” or “\”

$ command ls /tmp/tutorial/
chapter-one  readme

$ \ls /tmp/tutorial/
chapter-one  readme

References –

https://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/aliases.html

https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Bash-Builtins.html