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In Nautilus tree-view, pressing * (asterisk) expands the selected directory structure by ONE level.

Pressing * again will expand the structure by one more level.
...etc, etc, untl all levels are expanded.

Is there some way to expand ALL levels in just a single action?.

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  • Press and hold?
    – Oli
    Oct 22, 2010 at 23:20
  • Yes, but it has its drawbacks... not that this issue is particularly critical :), but it may be a nicety.... Eg. it took two and a half minutes to log one directory (lots of files and directories) and it doesn't recognize type-ahead... I had to sit there pressing the * key the whole while, and the only way I knew(?) that it had finished was that I couldn't hear my hard-drive seeking any more :) ... and yes I do wonder if it is really of much value anyhow.. but you never know.. These unusual situatoons just come out of the blue sometimes.. (just wondering... it may come in handy.
    – Peter.O
    Oct 23, 2010 at 0:05

2 Answers 2

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I'd suggest this is by design - if I click on File System then expand all branches this could take a huge amount of time, especially if I have NFS shares mounted, or similar. Or even worse - if I have a FUSE filesystem mounted, like sshfs, and Nautilus wants it to expand the entire subtree... not good.

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  • Yes, I must say that it did annoy me that Windows did a full expand (and ONLY that!) ... and it's great that Nautilus offers a single-level method... It's not exactly a mission critical option, so I'll just use repeated asterisks on the occasions I want to expand the full tree..
    – Peter.O
    Oct 23, 2010 at 1:59
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It can be done on Mac OSX Finder. So why not on some file manager on Ubuntu?

So, a workaround (a crap workaround) is to have a VM of OSX (official copies can be purchased for about $20 if you can't get one) and use this function through finder /:

While I can agree to the fact that it can take a long time to continually expand directories - again, from experience with finder -- it is an incredibly useful function.

You select the directory, and press the right arrow key to expand it, and you can continue doing this as far in as you want to go.

And you can do this to multiple folders within a single directory.

I find great use for this, as my folders are arranged in a logical (to me) structure, which I wish to be able to copy between systems, without necessarily copying contents.

In OS X, expanding numerous folders like this, and then copying to clipboard, and into a text editor : Copies the full file tree - with text indents for every subdirectory.

SUPER useful. There would be several other uses I imagine, and I'm sure the OP has one of his own.

If it's "by design", I hope file manager designers change their design a bit.

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