Manual Pages  — MTREE

The default action, if not overridden by command line options, is to compare the file hierarchy rooted in the current directory against a specification read from the standard input. Messages are written to the standard output for any files whose characteristics do not match the specification, or which are missing from either the file hierarchy or the specification.

The options are as follows:

-b	Suppress blank lines before entering and after exiting directories.
-C	Convert a specification into a format that's easier to parse with various tools. The input specification is read from standard input or from the file given by -f spec. In the output, each file or directory is represented using a single line (which might be very long). The full path name (beginning with "amp;./") is always printed as the first field; -K, -k, and -R can be used to control which other keywords are printed; -E and -I can be used to control which files are printed; and the -S option can be used to sort the output.
-c	Print a specification for the file hierarchy originating at the current working directory (or the directory provided by -p path) to the standard output. The output is in a style using relative path names.
-D	As per -C, except that the path name is always printed as the last field instead of the first.
-d	Ignore everything except directory type files.
-E tags	Add the comma separated tags to the "exclusion" list. Non-directories with tags which are in the exclusion list are not printed with -C and -D.
-e	Don't complain about files that are in the file hierarchy, but not in the specification.
-F flavor	Set the compatibility flavor of the mtree utility. The flavor can be one of mtree, freebsd9, or netbsd6. The default is mtree. The freebsd9 and netbsd6 flavors attempt to preserve output compatiblity and command line option backward compatibility with FreeBSD 9.0 and NetBSD respectively.
-f spec	Read the specification from file, instead of from the standard input. If this option is specified twice, the two specifications are compared to each other rather than to the file hierarchy. The specifications will be sorted like output generated using -c. The output format in this case is somewhat reminiscent of comm(1), having "in first spec only", "in second spec only", and "different" columns, prefixed by zero, one and two TAB characters respectively. Each entry in the "different" column occupies two lines, one from each specification.
-I tags	Add the comma separated tags to the "inclusion" list. Non-directories with tags which are in the inclusion list are printed with -C and -D. If no inclusion list is provided, the default is to display all files.
-i	If specified, set the schg and/or sappnd flags.
-j	Indent the output 4 spaces each time a directory level is descended when creating a specification with the -c option. This does not affect either the /set statements or the comment before each directory. It does however affect the comment before the close of each directory. This is the equivalent of the -i option in the FreeBSD version of mtree.
-K keywords	Add the specified (whitespace or comma separated) keywords to the current set of keywords. If ‘all’ is specified, add all of the other keywords.
-k keywords	Use the type keyword plus the specified (whitespace or comma separated) keywords instead of the current set of keywords. If ‘all’ is specified, use all of the other keywords. If the type keyword is not desired, suppress it with -R type.
-L	Follow all symbolic links in the file hierarchy.
-l	Do "loose" permissions checks, in which more stringent permissions will match less stringent ones. For example, a file marked mode 0444 will pass a check for mode 0644. "Loose" checks apply only to read, write and execute permissions -- in particular, if other bits like the sticky bit or suid/sgid bits are set either in the specification or the file, exact checking will be performed. This option may not be set at the same time as the -U or -u option.
-M	Permit merging of specification entries with different types, with the last entry taking precedence.
-m	If the schg and/or sappnd flags are specified, reset these flags. Note that this is only possible with securelevel less than 1 (i.e., in single user mode or while the system is running in insecure mode). See init(8) for information on security levels.
-n	Do not emit pathname comments when creating a specification. Normally a comment is emitted before each directory and before the close of that directory when using the -c option.
-N dbdir	Use the user database text file master.passwd and group database text file group from dbdir, rather than using the results from the system's getpwnam(3) and getgrnam(3) (and related) library calls.
-O onlypaths
	Only include files included in this list of pathnames.
-P	Don't follow symbolic links in the file hierarchy, instead consider the symbolic link itself in any comparisons. This is the default.
-p path	Use the file hierarchy rooted in path, instead of the current directory.
-q	Quiet mode. Do not complain when a "missing" directory cannot be created because it already exists. This occurs when the directory is a symbolic link.
-R keywords	Remove the specified (whitespace or comma separated) keywords from the current set of keywords. If ‘all’ is specified, remove all of the other keywords.
-r	Remove any files in the file hierarchy that are not described in the specification.
-S	When reading a specification into an internal data structure, sort the entries. Sorting will affect the order of the output produced by the -C or -D options, and will also affect the order in which missing entries are created or reported when a directory tree is checked against a specification. The sort order is the same as that used by the -c option, which is that entries within the same directory are sorted in the order used by strcmp(3), except that entries for subdirectories sort after other entries. By default, if the -S option is not used, entries within the same directory are collected together (separated from entries for other directories), but not sorted.
-s seed	Display a single checksum to the standard error output that represents all of the files for which the keyword cksum was specified. The checksum is seeded with the specified value.
-t	Modify the modified time of existing files, the device type of devices, and symbolic link targets, to match the specification.
-U	Same as -u except that a mismatch is not considered to be an error if it was corrected.
-u	Modify the owner, group, permissions, and flags of existing files, the device type of devices, and symbolic link targets, to match the specification. Create any missing directories, devices or symbolic links. User, group, and permissions must all be specified for missing directories to be created. Note that unless the -i option is given, the schg and sappnd flags will not be set, even if specified. If -m is given, these flags will be reset. Exit with a status of 0 on success, 2 if the file hierarchy did not match the specification, and 1 if any other error occurred.
-W	Don't attempt to set various file attributes such as the ownership, mode, flags, or time when creating new directories or changing existing entries. This option will be most useful when used in conjunction with -U or -u.
-X exclude-file
	The specified file contains fnmatch(3) patterns matching files to be excluded from the specification, one to a line. If the pattern contains a ‘amp;/’ character, it will be matched against entire pathnames (relative to the starting directory); otherwise, it will be matched against basenames only. Comments are permitted in the exclude-list file.
-x	Don't descend below mount points in the file hierarchy.

Specifications are mostly composed of "keywords", i.e. strings that that specify values relating to files. No keywords have default values, and if a keyword has no value set, no checks based on it are performed.

Currently supported keywords are as follows:

cksum	The checksum of the file using the default algorithm specified by the cksum(1) utility.
device	The device number to use for block or char file types. The argument must be one of the following forms:

format ,major ,minor
	A device with major and minor fields, for an operating system specified with format. See below for valid formats.
format ,major ,unit ,subunit
	A device with major, unit, and subunit fields, for an operating system specified with format. (Currently this is only supported by the bsdos format.)
number
	Opaque number (as stored on the file system).

The following values for format are recognized: native, 386bsd, 4bsd, bsdos, freebsd, hpux, isc, linux, netbsd, osf1, sco, solaris, sunos, svr3, svr4, and ultrix.