How to build a dendrogram from a directory tree?

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Given a root absolute directory path. How do I generate a dendrogram object of all path's below it so that I can visualize the directory tree with R?

Suppose the following call returned the following leaf nodes.

list.files(path, full.names = TRUE, recursive = TRUE)

root/a/some/file.R
root/a/another/file.R
root/a/another/cool/file.R
root/b/some/data.csv
root/b/more/data.csv

I'd like to make a plot in R like the output of the unix tree program:

root
├── a
│   ├── another
│   │   ├── cool
│   │   │   └── file.R
│   │   └── file.R
│   └── some
│       └── file.R
└── b
    ├── more
    │   └── data.csv
    └── some
        └── data.csv

It would be especially useful if the solution involved decomposing the file system tree into two data.frame's:

  1. a table of nodes (with which I could include attributes such as modification date)
  2. and a table of edges (also with attributes)

And then building the dendrogram object from those two data.frames.

dendrogram r
3 Answers

It's worth adding that excellent fs package offers dir_tree function that delivers this functionality to R in a very convenient manner. 

tmp_dir <- tempdir()
# Create some directories
for (i in 1:10) {
    dir.create(path = file.path(tmp_dir,
                                basename(tempfile(pattern = "dir")),
                                basename(tempfile(pattern = "sub_dir"))),
               recursive = TRUE)
}
# Create directory tree
fs::dir_tree(path = tmp_dir, recurse = TRUE)

Results

/tmp/RtmpEhB0ne
├── dir15213121dd5903
│   └── sub_dir1521315a5425ba
├── dir152131227b086f
│   └── sub_dir1521314255d96b
├── dir152131353e6603
│   └── sub_dir1521315b52aeed
├── dir15213136870535
│   └── sub_dir15213127b34f64
├── dir1521313bbf738b
│   └── sub_dir152131473939ea
├── dir152131403f4fd5
│   └── sub_dir152131115296e7
├── dir152131503d0d55
│   └── sub_dir15213114368572
├── dir1521316f0bb0c3
│   └── sub_dir1521314aea266b
├── dir1521317fe305e9
│   └── sub_dir152131bcfe8a
└── dir1521319800dfb
    └── sub_dir15213129defd4a

In addition to printing directory tree, discovered paths can be returned to an object.

sink(file = tempfile(fileext = ".log"))
res_fs_tree <- fs::dir_tree(path = tmp_dir, recurse = TRUE)
sink()
res_fs_tree[[1]]
# [1] "/tmp/RtmpEhB0ne/dir15213121dd5903/sub_dir1521315a5425ba"
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