Folder names exported to word/pdf?

I'm trying to organize my media files and one way I would like to try for easy navigation is having all files from all drives listed in alphabetical order. While I could have explorer and office/google docs on a share screen and just transcribe, I was wondering...is there was a way to take the names of the Folders and Files listed in one folder and have them exported to said document? Part of me is sure this exists, but the other part isn't quite sure how it could as I'm not sure it's possible.

Thanks!

I would look at file managers. There must be some that will export the file/folder names starting at a certain folder in the directory tree. Some of them, such as MultiCommander and others even have their own scripting language allowing you to program them. I rarely use anything other than Explorer except for directory syncing. But I would look at the most popular file managers like Directory Opus, Total Commander, XYPlorer etc..

Perhaps you can find a blog with a feature comparison of the most popular file manager software.

Silly off-the-top-of-my-head suggestion - command window and "dir" command? Can play with "dir" per "dir /?" description until the results are sorta what you want, then redirect output to a file and edit the file. If all drives can't be handled at once then some sort of (nonsimple) merge would have to be done - but I think that might be the case for any solution.

[The SysinternalsSuite (from Microsoft) has a boatload of cool commands - one or more of them also may be of interest (the whole suite is of interest, of course) - this one is just thrown out here because it's a cool set of programs and MAY have something like a super-dir command - I don't know]

Both of those ideas sound more promising than anything I could come up with. I'll play with Command Prompt first simply because it doesn't require me to download software.

Will attempt to update should I figure something out (even if "figuring something out" ends up being transcribing....).

Command Prompt got me close. It even looks like /O:N or /O:-N might work, but I'm having trouble figuring out the correct way to type it if it does.

I was able to list the contents of a specific folder, but that also brought in columns for time and date of last use. Looking for something a little cleaner than that.

livingdeadguy said:

I was able to list the contents of a specific folder, but that also brought in columns for time and date of last use. Looking for something a little cleaner than that.

Click to expand...

The "/B" option leaves just the name behind - there may be other combinations that have merit.

Also the command prompt has the "tree" command. It is likely not as useful as dir in this instance. The Linux world has long had an "awk" pattern matching command. There are free versions of it that will run on Windows command line. Also if you search on "awk one liners" there are scads of awk(sometimes the awk may be named "nawk" for new awk or sometimes "gawk") one liners with descriptions of what they do. It is very useful for pulling out the parts of text you want and filtering out the chaff. The pattern matching is pretty easy to understand.

The good thing about it is that it is handy to have. You will likely find other uses for it long after this issue is solved. Some of the awk packages come with a bash shell that runs on Windows command prompt. Others are stand alone exe. The bash packages are more powerful but for someone who is mainly into Windows and not familiar with Linux the stand alone exe is probably the way to go.

In this case one would direct the command line output to a file as suggested, then use the pattern matching to isolate only the folder and file names desired. There is likely a one-liner already on one of the awk blogs that does something very similar and would only need a slight tweak.

MilesAhead said:

Also the command prompt has the "tree" command...

Click to expand...

Oh, wow - it's been so long (like decades?) since I putzed around with DOS commands that I forgot the "tree" command - that one probably mimics the "dir" command with some added "graphics" but it for sure has nice output.

As a Unix weenie I was gonna suggest some sort of set of UNIX commands like "find" piped to "sort", etc - kinda what "awk" does in one go but thought it was too convoluted an approach (requiring installation of software, etc - I have CYGWIN installed on my ancient machine 'cause I just can't keep away from it!). Strangely, I don't have a lot of experience using "awk", certainly not recently, so would not have suggested it though it probably is the better UNIX command to use for this problem.

brokensoftware said:

MilesAhead said:

Also the command prompt has the "tree" command...

Click to expand...

Oh, wow - it's been so long (like decades?) since I putzed around with DOS commands that I forgot the "tree" command - that one probably mimics the "dir" command with some added "graphics" but it for sure has nice output.

As a Unix weenie I was gonna suggest some sort of set of UNIX commands like "find" piped to "sort", etc - kinda what "awk" does in one go but thought it was too convoluted an approach (requiring installation of software, etc - I have CYGWIN installed on my ancient machine 'cause I just can't keep away from it!). Strangely, I don't have a lot of experience using "awk", certainly not recently, so would not have suggested it though it probably is the better UNIX command to use for this problem.

Click to expand...

I agree the find command is very powerful. The main reason I suggested awk is the pattern matching symbols are a bit easier for the newbie to grok and the possibility a one-liner may be already out there that needs only a slight modification to do the job. It is kind of weird that after all these decades there isn't a native search command in Windows that feeds the results to other commands like find does. You have to use a third party tool still. Well I guess the answer would be to use powershell. But I found the syntax off-putting and avoided learning it. If I was a sysadmin managing a domain I would bite the bullet and learn it though.

brokensoftware said:

livingdeadguy said:

I was able to list the contents of a specific folder, but that also brought in columns for time and date of last use. Looking for something a little cleaner than that.

Click to expand...

The "/B" option leaves just the name behind - there may be other combinations that have merit.

Click to expand...

This works quite well! A program may exist that exports to Word or Excel clean, but I'm satisfied here. Thanks!