How do we specify multiple ignore patterns for `tree` command?

Question

I need to print the directory structure of our production system and I would like to remove some specific directories from the tree?

How do we specify multiple ignore patterns for tree command?

Answer 1

You simply provide all the patterns to the -I command, separated by |. From the manpage:

-P pattern
      List  only  those files that match the wild-card pattern.  Note:
      you must use the -a option to also consider those  files  begin‐
      ning  with a dot `.' for matching.  Valid wildcard operators are
      `*' (any zero or more characters), `?' (any  single  character),
      `[...]'  (any single character listed between brackets (optional
      - (dash) for character  range  may  be  used:  ex:  [A-Z]),  and
      `[^...]'  (any  single character not listed in brackets) and `|'
      separates alternate patterns.

-I pattern
      Do not list those files that match the wild-card pattern.

So, for example

tree -I 'test*|docs|bin|lib'

skips the 'docs', 'bin', and 'lib', directories, and any directory with 'test' in the name, wherever they may lie within the directory hierarchy. Obviously, you can apply wildcards for much more powerful matching.

Answer 2

This answer does not specifically answer the question, however a common reason for doing operations like this is to ignore things that git ignores.

Tree has added a --gitignore flag as of tree Version 2.0.0 (12/21/2021).

If you have a version of tree older than this and you have ripgrep installed you could create an alias like this to achieve something similar.

alias itree='rg --files | tree --fromfile'