How To Get File Listings As Text

[@johnnywrjackson]

Where was this 20 years ago? PURE GOLD!

[@einsteinparrot]

great tip! Thanks so much!

[@rgarlinyc]

Very insightful - thanks a ton Gary!

[@bitsmith]

Bravo Gary! Love the use of a CLI pipeline and regular expressions wrapped up in a Shortcut to come up with a great solution! Thanks again for showing off the non-obvious power under the hood of macOS.

[@Erin-Thor]

Once again you have hit a home run! I learn SOMETHING in every video you do. 👍🏽🤓👍🏼

[@carolinebarlow4795]

Thanks very much, Gary, for this informative video! Really useful methods here.

[@vrvretro]

Fabulous! Gary, you're the best.

[@kqschwarz]

Unbelievably useful tips and fabulous presentation.

[@loisskiathitis8926]

A very useful and informative video tutorial today! Thank you, Gary! 👏🏻❤️

[@AussieAdventurer]

Your knowledge is absolutely amazing 🤩 Thank you for sharing this video 🙏

[@denhouse1]

As usual, very impressive and useful

[@xultrac]

This trick with the Finder is amazing. Thank you

[@philiprand3720]

I thought CSV served to transmit Contact items, but I'll explore its potential for dealing with pdfs and making them palatable for a spreadsheet. Infinite thanks again.

[@SoNowWhat]

Oh, will this tutorial come in handy. Many thanks.

[@garynagle3093]

Wow!!! Another great video!

[@MosheFeder]

Gary, this is great, but I really want is an app that will do something similar for my iPhone and iPad. It should not just produce a list, but pull the description of each app from the App Store.

[@cemgencler5127]

Thanks a lot! This was what I needed for my book archive.

[@robertmarkusneiger6810]

excellent, thank you

[@escapelevel1]

I've always wanted to know how to do this!!

[@bhavearth]

Thanks, the shortcut tip is awesome

[@JonBushell]

Great! I think you can drag folder contents to excel too and it will make a file listing. But only works in Mac apparently.

[@macforme]

Only works in Mac? is there something else?..... 😂🤣🤣🤣 nay! nay!

[@Slave-Of-Christ]

St. Gary!

[@philiprand3720]

Right, in fact I was sure that Numbers to Excel wouldn't be a problem. I'lll experiment with PDF in Preview (Anteprima).

[@garrysingh4484]

💡Automator or Shortcut is your best friend: You won't have to deal with removing folders in the listing. I have been using Automator to achieve this for years: - Create a Java script to get the file path - Add copy to clipboard

[@macforme]

Let us know how to get you into the Webbies contention so we can vote for you!!!

[@grahamf695]

Hi Gary, thanks this is really useful. I need to take this a step further. I went on holiday with a group of people and I am going to share my photos with them. I have carefully added titles, headlines (just a copy of the titles in my case) and descriptions to the file metadata, using a photo editing application. I am not sure whether my friends will be able to look at the metadata. Therefore, I would like to produce a simple spreadsheet or document with the filename in column 1, title or headline in column 2, and the description in column 3, and GPS location data in column 4. This data does not appear in the Finder window, but it does appear when I right click on the file in Finder and select Get Info. Do you know if there is a way to do this?

[@macmost]

Sorry, I don't know of a simple way to do this. Why make this so complex when apps like Photos (or Google Photos, etc) make it so easy to share photos with friends?

[@grahamf695]

@@macmost Hi Gary, I used Photos and iCloud sharing with my family and I agree that is the easiest way to do it. The title and description appear in Photos, so that works fine for me. However, some of my friends are not very computer literate. They won't know where to find the photo metadata on their computers. They might just store the photos in a Windows folder, rather than using Google Photos or equivalent.

[@davidpatrick1813]

Amazing work, thanks

[@philiprand3720]

Again many thanks! As for my bank statements, I'll experiment with Preview (Anteprima in Italian).which is terrific in many ways, but I'm sure my "commercialista" /accountant) will cope with PDF. She is probably Windows, but I think a Numbers file is perfectly readable to an Excel user.

[@macmost]

Excel can't read Numbers files. But you can easily export from Numbers to Excel format.

[@user-ui2wi6sw9f]

Excellent, thanks!

[@wiwingmargahayu6831]

wow

[@stephenbridges2791]

Nice ideas. You could just make a recursive list with ls -R and arrow it out to a plain text file, as well. I generally do that with the current date when searching through music and the like. I don't have enough documents to have to do it.

[@leetownsend5082]

When I do CMD ->, I only get the top layer of subfolders. I will now try Plan B.

[@leetownsend5082]

Using the Terminal - nothing worked to list subfolders of subfolders.. However, I pasted the clipboard data created by the Shortcut to Word, replaced all / with ^t. Then copied it all and pasted it into Excel. Tada. Maybe there is a way to include that process in the Shortcut. It's time for me to go to your Shortcuts course. Also, where do you get Tree?