Printing entire folder contents list

[Woodlandjustin]

Hi guys,
I have been wanting to do this for ages and have never been able to find out:

How can I print the entire contents list of a folder? Screen grab will not work, because it only takes a snapshot of the contents displayed on the screen at one time. That's fine for a folder with only 20 items. But how about with 200 items? Or 2000? (I have tried multiple screen shots and that is extremely tiresome and impractical).

Is there any way to just save the contents list as an image file, text file, or spreadsheet? I spreadsheet would be easiest, with all the sizes, dates created etc. listed in it. But any way of saving the list in whatever form would be very useful for me to hear about.

Thanks in advance!

 

[smirk]

I'm not in front of a Mac right now, but for printing can you not open the Finder window and then just select File->Print? From the Print dialog box you could then save as PDF or something.

Or to get a list of files, can't you just open the Finder window, command-A to select all, command-C to copy it to the clipboard, then open Excel or TextEdit and paste it in?

 

[Woodlandjustin]

I'm not in front of a Mac right now, but for printing can you not open the Finder window and then just select File->Print? From the Print dialog box you could then save as PDF or something.

No. No print option on Finder windows.

Or to get a list of files, can't you just open the Finder window, command-A to select all, command-C to copy it to the clipboard, then open Excel or TextEdit and paste it in?

No. That copies the files themselves, not the information displayed about them.

Anyone any ideas? The guys at Mac support had no idea.
Thanks!

 

[Weaselboy]

How can I print the entire contents list of a folder?

cd ~/Documents
ls > ~/Desktop/files.txt

Open Terminal app from /Applications/Utilities. Paste or type in the first line above then hit enter (substituting whatever folder name you want to list if it is not Documents like my example). Then paste or type in the second line and hit enter. That will give you a text file on your desktop with a list of all files in the folder.

You can also apply options to the ls command to sort by different criteria. In the Terminal type "man ls" (without the quotes) to see all the options.

 

[Woodlandjustin]

Hi Weaselboy,
Thanks, that seems to be coming close. Is there really no way to print the info from finder though? It would be so useful because it shows the folder colours (I have mine colour coded), and the folder sizes.

 

[jsgreen]

Here's another thread related to your question - kind of worked when I tried it:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1021368/


post back if you figure out a nicer solution, would be good to know.

 

[GGJstudios]

How can I print the entire contents list of a folder?

1. Open the folder in Finder
2. Command-A to select all
3. Command-C to copy
4. Open TextEdit
5. Command-Shift-T to change format to plain text
6. Command-V to paste

 

[Weaselboy]

Hi Weaselboy,
Thanks, that seems to be coming close. Is there really no way to print the info from finder though? It would be so useful because it shows the folder colours (I have mine colour coded), and the folder sizes.

Sorry, I don't know of a way to capture the colors in that text output.