I know it has been over a decade, but I found this question by explicitly searching to see if there was anyone out there who had asked such a question.

I find its existence both funny and heart-warming, and the responses cause me to wonder if one factor keeping more people from asking such a question is the obvious self-answer of "well, the output of tree is meant for humans."

And while that is certainly correct, it hasn't - for me - stopped the question from popping into my head several times (over many years, but still.) For example, what if OP did not have access to a filesystem like the answer using the find command requires, but like OP stated "This tree output is saved in a file" and the user wants to parse this file, which those find commands will not do.

So... I ended up spending way more time than expected or intended solving this problem, so the time-value/cost-benefit ratios are not in favor of the resulting tool. As such, I thought that since I will never likely correct that value imbalance with my own usage, that I would set about to see if anyone else had searched for a solution to the problem of parsing tree output from some document, and creating the directories and (empty) files represented in this tree on a filesystem.

So, in the interest of retroactively recouping the time/effort spent with collective time/effort saved, I would like to present this new tool, which you can run from bash, or even from vscode (I already admitted to spending too much time on this): https://github.com/scottvr/eert