METHOD OF CONTROLLING VIEW OF LARGE EXPANSION TREE

A method of viewing a directory tree containing logical file system objects residing on a computer system, by displaying a directory tree on a display device of the computer system utilizing a graphical user interface (GUI), expanding a first node of the tree to reveal one or more branches of the first node, and then later expanding a second node of the tree to reveal one or more branches of the second node, wherein the invention automatically collapses the first node of the tree to conceal the one or more branches of the first node in response to the expanding of the second node. This automatic collapsing of other nodes that are not in the path of the selected node thus limits overall expansion of the tree. The setting may be toggled between enabled and disabled states. A pull-down menu can be provided by the GUI which contains the “limit expansion” command.