From Tree to Tea

I recently wrote some help comments for a PowerShell function and needed to show an example directory structure and because I have, ermm, issues, I wanted a way to do it exactly the same in all my help comments. So, the inevitable Google search began and I soon discovered tree.exe, which did the trick.

I am blogging about this because tree.exe comes with a nasty little issue that I want to remember (and you can benefit - how nice of me ;-)). Running the following produces a tree structure with garbage encoding:

PS:\>Tree $Path /F | Out-File C:\Temp\tree.txt

And adding the -Encoding parameter doesn't help. The only way I managed to make this useful is to pipe the tree output to the clipboard and paste it into notepad, like so:

PS:\>Tree $Path /F | Clip

Result!

This stackoverflow thread helps explain the issue nicely: http://stackoverflow.com/a/139302