18

I have a few hundred files in a folder on a Windows 7 machine. Is there a way to generate an XLS, or CSV file from the file names in the folder?

A text file is fine as well; Just looking for any method to automatically extract the file names.

Improve this question

4 Answers 4

Reset to default
15

One very quick and dirty way is the command prompt. Simply open one, navigate to your folder and funnel the result into a text file using this command:

dir > filenames.txt

You will have to do some cleaning up, but as I said "quick and dirty". :-) If you only want certain objects you can of course limit the output of your 'dir' command.

The option Cybertox mentioned might be a good idea:

/B Uses bare format (no heading information or summary).

Improve this answer
2
  • 11
    dir /b would get you just the filenames
    – Shazvi
    Apr 22, 2014 at 16:21
  • dir /b - all files ... except hidden files. If you want those, include /a. For more options try dir /?
    – Adrian Pronk
    Apr 24, 2014 at 11:15
28

You can use PowerShell to create an actual CSV file:

dir | Export-Csv MyFileList.csv

Improve this answer
2
  • It puts the result in the folder. I would then open it in VS Code using the Excel Viewer extension (this is a much lighter weight way to view Excel and CSV).
    – yeOldeDataSmythe
    May 8, 2019 at 17:54
  • 1
    Thanks, found this useful. Please all, be aware that this added MyFileList to the file list!
    – PJRobot
    Nov 3, 2020 at 18:01
6

This used to work on older Windows versions and gave the full path of all files:

dir /s /b > list.txt
Improve this answer
1
  • 1
    Assuming you don't want the directory names of the directories each directory contains, use: dir /s /b /a-d > list.txt
    – Engineer
    Apr 23, 2014 at 1:09
3

If you also want the metadata (owner, size, modified date), see PowerShell command to write directory to CSV for a one-liner

Powershell code from source by Andrew Z.

powershell "Get-ChildItem -Filter *.mp3 -Recurse E:\media\music\ | ForEach-Object {$_ | add-member -name "Owner" -membertype noteproperty -value (get-acl $_.fullname).owner -passthru} | Sort-Object Length -Descending | Select FullName,Name,Length,CreationTime,LastWriteTime,Owner | Export-Csv -Force -NoTypeInformation c:\temp\mpeg-3.csv"

This is slightly changed to fufill the criteria drewdqueue needed, which was all MP3 files in descending order or size and Name as a seperate entry.

Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .