Make an access directory structure tree?

Question

I want to run a script that will show me all the folders (output to a text file) that the running user can see starting from root, down to the point where it doesn't have the permissions to go any further.

Does anyone have a script for this?

I am running RedHat 6

Answer 1

Just run tree -d as that user, using either sudo -u or su.

# sudo -u grawity tree -d /run
/run
├── dbus
├── dovecot
├── gdm [error opening dir]
├── httpd
...

Answer 2

This could be done from the command line using:

tree -d / > textfile.txt 2> /dev/null

while logged into that account. This would provide a long-form directory listing recursively, write the output to textfile.txt and the errors to the blackhole that is /dev/null. If you want to keep the errors remove the 2> redirect. If done from the root account, you can add sudo -u <username> to the beginning of the command to perform the task as another user. If it needs to be a script you could either just drop the command into a shell script, or if you only need to do this yourself and want ease of access, you could make an alias with the command.

Edit: Now that you've added that you're on RHEL, I know of two different ways of handling this. If you don't need to actually draw the tree structure but just want a recursive listing of directories, you can switch tree -d for find / -type d -ls or, were you to have installation priveleges, run yum install tree.