Last Updated: February 25, 2016
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602
· benjacob

Generate a list of contents of any directory using terminal

There are situation in which you need to share a list of all the files in a directory and there is more to it than what you see in viewport if sharing a screenshot is the easier way -

Here's the terminal command to generate a list of all contents of any directory, and export to a text file.

ls -l -R path_to/source/directory > ~/Desktop/file_name.txt

Replace path_to/source/directory with actual source, or just drag the source directory into the terminal window after ls -l -R if you're lazy to type the whole path & finish the command with destination+filename before you hit Return key.

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If you ever want to get a list of files, excluding of all the details (permissions, size, modification times etc) just change -l to -1

over 1 year ago ·

Also, if you only want to copy that list to your keyboard for pasting(with additional formatting options):

ls -alRth | pbcopy

over 1 year ago ·