What is the difference between a tree and a directory?

I am a git novice trying to sort through the concepts 开发者_Go百科and terms. The git glossary says a tree is equivalent to a directory and a directory is what you get with ls. Are they interchangeable terms? Or are "tree" and "directory" to be used in different contexts or to refer to separate (though related) things?

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The short answer: yes, a tree is a directory and a directory is a tree.

The long answer: A tree is an object that contains a list of blobs, the names to attach to the blobs, and other trees and the names to attach to them. http://book.git-scm.com/1_the_git_object_model.html has a pretty good explanation of the different object types in the git model; I would suggest reading it!

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In Git terminology, a "tree" is a hierarchical structure of files and directories. This is (purposefully) very similar to a directory in a filesystem.

A Git commit object contains a reference to a tree object, which is the state of all files at the time of that commit.

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• The Git Object Model
• All Git Object Types: Blob, Tree, Commit And Tag

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To put it simply, the "tree" refers to the snapshot of the entire repository state at that moment in time (like what you've got for your current code [which is also known as HEAD], of the repository when the currently checked-out commit was made, etc.)

Directory is just referring to a filesystem directory.