I can haz sitemap?

May 1, 2008 7:59 AM

How can I print the directory structure of my website?

I've seen this question, and mine is similar, except I would like to do it over an FTP connection, if possible.

I work on the web team for a small, liberal-arts college. Our site has gotten unmanageably large, and we would like to create an *actual* sitemap (we have a sitemap, but the actual server has much much more than it technically should). I've considered just FTPing the whole site to a local machine, and running the dos TREE command, but it doesn't sort alphabetically, and we're talking about FTPing a LOT of stuff (like, it would take a day or so to do the transfer).

The site is running on IIS6 on a Win2K3 box (I know, I know...) so I can't really take advantage of some of the unix commands designed to do specifically what I want. And I don't believe TREE ships with Win2K3 (and even if it did, I can't use it, since it doesn't sort alphabetically).

What are my options here?

posted by fvox13 to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

One simple option (non-FTP) would be to use a little script (presumably something written in ASP or .Net since it's running on IIS) that does a recursive scan of the folder structure and outputs this as HTML. It's not particularly complicated to do, although you'd probably have to set a nice bit timeout for the script if there are a lot of files. This one appears to do pretty much what you need.
posted by le morte de bea arthur at 8:09 AM on May 1, 2008

That should have been 'big timeout', not 'bit'. Fingers like hams.
posted by le morte de bea arthur at 8:10 AM on May 1, 2008

If your site has fewer than 500 pages, you can use this free tool to crawl the site to generate a Google XML sitemap, which you could convert to other formats if you need them.

If the site is larger, I believe they have for-pay options, too.
posted by jacob at 8:11 AM on May 1, 2008

The difference between jacob's answer and mine is that the former will give you an actual 'site map' in the web sense (presumably only the publicly-accessible pages), whereas the latter gives you a directory structure. Depends really what you want - your question is a little ambiguous...
posted by le morte de bea arthur at 8:14 AM on May 1, 2008

Response by poster: @le morte de bea arthur: We're justing looking for a directory structure, for internal auditing purposes.
posted by fvox13 at 8:22 AM on May 1, 2008

Just doing some quick googling and came across this article detailing a wsh solution to your problem. Haven't tried it but it appears to be what you want.
posted by mmascolino at 9:19 AM on May 1, 2008

If you're more comfortable or familiar with Unix commands, cygwin lets you use some of them on Windows.

Well. I was honestly surprised to see that ncftp has no ability to pipe stuff, but then I noticed that ncftpls does exactly what you want.
posted by Pronoiac at 7:32 PM on May 1, 2008

Hah! ncftpls, even.
posted by Pronoiac at 12:26 AM on May 2, 2008

Okay, so that might do what you want.

Upon re-reading, Gnuwin32 Tree for Windows might be better.
posted by Pronoiac at 1:02 AM on May 2, 2008

dir /b/s/ad>foo.txt
from the root of your site might do the trick...
posted by charlie7691 at 2:04 AM on May 2, 2008