DIY_GIT_in_Python/how_to/Change_08.md

• write-tree: List files

The next command is write-tree. This command will take the current working directory and store it to the object database. If hash-object was for storing an individual file, then write-tree is for storing a whole directory.

Like hash-object, write-tree is going to give us an OID after it’s done and we’ll be able to use the OID in order to retrieve the directory at a later time.

In Git’s lingo a “tree” means a directory.

We’ll get into the details in later changes, in this change we’ll only prepare the code around the feature:

• Create a write-tree CLI command

• Create a write_tree() function in base module. Why in base module and not in data module? Because write_tree() is not going to write to disk directly but use the object database provided by data to store the directory. Hence it belongs to the higher-level base module.

• Add code to write_tree() to print a directory recursively. For now nothing is written anywhere, but we just coded the boilerplate to recursively scan a directory.

We continue in the next change.