Fun with pipes

Just came across this excellent post: Poor mans mind mapping tool with just the terminal from @fullstackthaumaturge (account no longer exists) toot on Fosstodon. The whole premise is that you can do a lot things with the UNIX philosophy of using files for everything and manipulating them with simple tools that do one thing but do it well. So if you wanted a mindmap then just touch files in a folder hierarchy and then print it out with tree.

I found that amusing and thought, “well what if you don’t want to clutter your file-system and wanted to zip up your mindmap?” Would you be able to get a nice tree output without unzipping the archive? Well turns out you can do just that by piping from zipinfo to tree, which supports reading from a file (instead of reading a file-system) using the --fromfile argument.

So you end up with this command:

1

zipinfo -1 mindmap.zip | tree --fromfile $1 -C -r

and this output:

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11

.
`-- mindmap
    |-- top
    |-- first
    |   |-- second
    |   `-- first
    `-- 2
        |-- 2
        `-- 1

3 directories, 5 files

I’m not suggesting anyone do this, but it’s a fun example of UNIX principles and pipes.