-in the current working directory. Note that the usage is subtly different,
-though - 'paths' denote just a list of patterns to match, e.g. so specifying
-directory name (without '-r') will behave differently, and order of the
-arguments does not matter.
+in the current working directory. Note that:
+
+ - the behaviour is slightly different from that of "/bin/ls" in that the
+ 'paths' denote just a list of patterns to match, e.g. so specifying
+ directory name (without '-r') will behave differently, and order of the
+ arguments does not matter.
+
+ - the behaviour is similar to that of "/bin/ls" in that the 'paths' is
+ taken as relative to the current working directory. E.g. when you are
+ in a directory 'sub' that has a directory 'dir', you can run 'git
+ ls-tree -r HEAD dir' to list the contents of the tree (that is
+ 'sub/dir' in 'HEAD'). You don't want to give a tree that is not at the
+ root level (e.g. 'git ls-tree -r HEAD:sub dir') in this case, as that
+ would result in asking for 'sub/sub/dir' in the 'HEAD' commit.