List Folder Contents

When I first began saving music to my hard drive as mp3s, it soon dawned on me that it would be handy to have a list of everything I had saved there. I had a nice neat folder called "Music," but given that there were hundreds of songs in that folder, I had no real way of documenting what songs I had.

There is only one obvious way to list the contents of a folder: open the folder, do a print screen, and paste that image into Word. You can then print the Word file. Of course, the obvious limitation of this plan is that you only get the list items that show up on the visible screen with each screen grab. In the case of my music file, the several hundred file names would require me to repeat that process over and over again, and the resulting printed pages would not be very easy to read. In addition, I could make no alterations to this list as it was in image form.

There are third party applications that will perform this task for you. One that I use is called Print Folders, and it can be downloaded here.

But here's another quick, easy way to do the job without a download:

Open the folder whose contents you wish to print. Right click in any blank space, and select "Properties." Note the file path.

Now, go to Start/Run, and type in: cmd.

This will open the command window.

You will see a cursor flashing next to the C prompt, or next to the path on the C drive where the Command window opens. Either way, type in cd, then a space, and then the location of the folder whose contents you wish to print. Then hit Enter.

You will now see the folder location you specified, followed by a the flashing cursor. Now, type "dir (space) > (space) list.txt " (without the quotes). Again, hit Enter.

That's it - you can close out the command window.

Now, look in the folder whose contents you wish to print. You will see a text file there, called "list.txt." That is a text file (which will typically open in Notepad) containing a listing of all the files contained in that folder. This file can be edited, even formatted for listing in a Excel file, and of course, printed.

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