Creating a List of Files of a Directory With Command-line

I recently had to provide a list of files in a USB thumbdrive/stick and learned a sweet trick via CLI. This method provides a text, Word or Excel file that lists all the files and folders inside a specific directory within your computer.

Basic command structure

Syntax:

DIR [pathname(s)] [display_format] [file_attributes] [sorted] [time] [options]

Example:

dir /s > output.doc

dir lists all the files and folders contained in the folder

/s will list all the files in the subfolders as well

Output.doc is the document file containing the entire directory and the details. It may be in another format such as a simple .txt file which can be edited on Notepad.

Listing only certain types of files

The command will be:

dir /s \*.pdf > output_pdf.doc

(.pdf) is a wildcard function that will only select .pdf files.

List bare format (no heading, sizes or summary)

The switch /b will list file names, however when displaying subfolders with dir /b /s, the command will return a full pathname.

dir /b /s > output_pdf.doc

Using the tree command instead of dir

This command will produce a tree listing of the current directory

tree /f > output.txt

/f displays the names of the files within each directory listed.

/a may be used to specify alternative (ascii) characters to be used to draw the tree diagram so that it can be printed by printers that do not support the line and box drawing characters.