How To Get File Listings As Text

[@einsteinparrot]

great tip! Thanks so much!

[@rgarlinyc]

Very insightful - thanks a ton Gary!

[@vrvretro]

Fabulous! Gary, you're the best.

[@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.

[@kqschwarz]

Unbelievably useful tips and fabulous presentation.

[@xultrac]

This trick with the Finder is amazing. Thank you

[@loisskiathitis8926]

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

[@carolinebarlow4795]

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

[@AussieAdventurer]

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

[@denhouse1]

As usual, very impressive and useful

[@Erin-Thor]

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

[@SoNowWhat]

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

[@garynagle3093]

Wow!!! Another great video!

[@cemgencler5127]

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

[@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.

[@davidpatrick1813]

Amazing work, thanks

[@johnnywrjackson]

Where was this 20 years ago? PURE GOLD!

[@user-ui2wi6sw9f]

Excellent, thanks!

[@robertmarkusneiger6810]

excellent, thank you

[@Slave-Of-Christ]

St. Gary!

[@escapelevel1]

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

[@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.

[@bhavearth]

Thanks, the shortcut tip is awesome

[@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.

[@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!

[@CharlesHolder]

This works really well on MacOS but there isn’t a Shortcut - Shell Script function in iPadOS. Is there an alternative for iPadOS and iOS? Thanks for the great work you do to help us understand Mac systems.

[@macmost]

Nope, you can't do any shell scripting or anything close to it on those locked-down systems.

[@ruxinxie9739]

great video! but looks like the shortcut applies to non-icloud folder. i got "no matches found" when i select my icloud folders... very good tutorial, thank you!

[@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

[@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.

[@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.

[@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?

[@leetownsend5082]

When I paste into TextEdit, I get 'filename' not just the filename. Then: Select all using CMD A then CMD right arrow gets the files with open folders highlighted. Option CMD C pasted into plain text in TextEdit is where the problem is. I don't get the lovely list in your video, I am running Safari 18.1.1 in MacOS 15.1.1 on a 2019 MBP.. This format issue also happens with just a short listing of tiles - no folders. I really want this method to work as I don't want to have to use Terminal.

[@leetownsend5082]

Once the filenames were in TextEdit, I replaced all ' ' with a paragraph break. I also had to delete ' from start of the first line. Then it looked like your result and I could proceed.

[@philiprand3720]

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

[@wiwingmargahayu6831]

wow

[@macforme]

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