Tip: Saving Folder Contents to a Plain text file
By: Michelle Lopez, Associate Editor
I wanted to get organized, or at least try to be organized. So I wanted a list of all my applications along with the code and any other info with it. I wanted to be able to save this in a spreadsheet file but other than typing it our manually I couldn’t think of an easy way to do it.
Well searching around the web I found out that if you drag a folder in TextWrangler (free program From BareBones Software ) it will create a text file of the folder contents. I then copy and pasted the text into NeoOffice Spreadsheet (free program From Neo Office
Now I can add a column for Download site, user name and password. How I paid for it or if I was free etc. This way if and/or when I need to re-install everything I have it all in the same place.
Nice tip! Just found it works in Textmate too.
Comment by George Starcher — May 2, 2007 @ 8:35 am
Err… I guess you could do it that way. OS X has a UNIX core and a very powerful command-line. Getting a file listing is very easy.
1) open a terminal
2) type “ls [space]” and drag the folder to the terminal (the full path will be pasted in for you) then [enter]. This will list all the files in that folder. Cut and paste.
You can also type “ls [folder] > listing.txt” to dump the file list straight into “listing.txt”. You can do all kinds of incredible things with simple combinations of commands, or things that might take hours to do in the GUI with a short script:
cat docs/**/*.txt > bigfile.txt
which takes each text file that is anywhere under the docs folder and dumps them all into one file. This kind of thing becomes especially powerfull combined with commands like grep (finds files or lines in files matching patterns) or diff (finds differences between files head or tail (removes the beginning or end of files) and so forth. OS X has a lot of power under the hood.
Comment by Eric Vought — May 3, 2007 @ 2:24 pm
Err… I don’t think I’m brave enough to open terminal and try this, but maybe I’ll give it a try.
Thanks!
Comment by CntrySigns — May 3, 2007 @ 5:28 pm
Michelle, great freeware tip. I can see how that would be helpful.
Eric, thanks for the terminal directions – nice and easy!
Comment by Matt Beckwith — May 4, 2007 @ 5:22 am