Or banging your head against a wall, either. Holy crap, it’s a list of just the file names without the paths.Įasy, huh? Now you can print a list of your files without having to resort to third-party programs, screenshots, Terminal, or Automator. Select the files again, and instead of dragging them, hit Command-C (or choose Edit > Copy), then go back to your TextEdit document and hit Command-V (or choose Edit > Paste). If you work with Unix files and folders a lot, you’ve probably already noticed that you can’t see many of them in the Finderthe /usr, /bin, and /etc folders, amongst many others, don’t. What if you don’t like the paths, though? What if a file path traumatized you when you were a child? It’s lucky that there’s an easy way around that, then. If, however, you’ve done as I suggested, you’ll get a neatly formatted list of files, complete with the folder path that contains each of them. The base folders for the different configuration options are: When using a separate configuration for each user. If you see the formatting toolbar pointed out above, your TextEdit document is set to rich text. To simplify the document, we replace the following base folders with some abbreviated names: PRIVATEFOLDER. If you’ve ignored my rich-text/plain-text advice above, you may get a bunch of pasted graphics (or what have you). The first way to start your list is to select the files you want in it and drag them into that TextEdit document. You’ll want to make sure that you’re using a plain-text document and not a rich-text one, which you can toggle under the Format menu or by hitting Shift-Command-T.

zshrc profile in your preferred text editor, we’re using nano because nano is easy: Hit Control+O and Control. A simple alias will allow you to view folder trees from the command line of Mac OS: Launch Terminal or iTerm if you haven’t done so already. So open that and get a new document started. Make a tree Equivalent to View Folder Trees in Terminal for Mac OS X. We’re going to be using the TextEdit program for this, which is a nifty little word processor that comes by default on your Mac.

There are a couple of good ways to print or save a list of a folder’s contents, depending on what result you’re looking for.

Mac os list files in folder