Open terminal in folder mac free#

Ls -R | grep ':$' | sed -e 's/:$//' -e 's/*//-/g' -e 's/^/ /' -e 's/-/|/'Īs you can see by that last option, the command-line options for formatting and clearly displaying folder contents can get complicated, and while it can be fun for IT geeks, for the average user it can be an exercise in frustration. List all subfolders with formatted output (go ahead, copy and paste it to the Terminal) For these commands, first use the 'cd' command to go to the folder of your choice, and then run them to list the contents of the folder and subdirectories.

Open terminal in folder mac free#

Unfortunately, the terminal is very syntax-aware, so typos in commands may give errors however, with the following commands you cannot harm anything in your system, so feel free to play around with them and saving the output to files using the Unix redirect. This can be used for any Terminal command, including 'ls' and others that output the contents of directories and subdirectories in the system. In this command, the redirect '>' will create a file called 'FILE.txt' in your home folder (indicated by the tilde '~') that will contain the output of the 'ls' command. If you have a directory open in the terminal, you can use the 'ls' command followed by a unix redirect to save the contents to a text file. There are a number of terminal commands that will list and find files and folders on the drive, the most notable of which is the 'ls' command. One beneficial feature when running terminal commands is redirecting the output into a text file that you can then open and print. The fun way (at least, from a geek's point of view) to do this is to use the terminal to output and format directory contents. For TextEdit and other text editors, using a plain text format will overcome this since the format only supports text characters, but for other document formats this may be an issue to be aware of. Keep in mind that OS X treats many copied items as objects, so in trying to paste them into other programs the system may try embedding the copied items' content instead of just the name. However, it does not indicate which items are folders versus files, and does not display any heirarchies so if you are in the Finder list view and have a subdirectory expanded, upon pasting them all into the text document you will not see any indication of which are in the subdirectories. The benefits of this are that it's simple and straightforward, and if you just want to catalog the contents of the current folder then this is all you need. Change the document's format to 'Plain Text' in the 'Format' menu and then paste the clipboard contents to the document. To do this, open the desired folder you want to list the contents of, and select all items (command-A) then copy them (command-C) and open TextEdit. There are a number of ways to get around this limitation of OS X, some of which may be better than others depending on the circumstances, which include using TextEdit for simple listings and the Terminal for more complex ones, but for people who are not inclined on having fun with the Terminal, you can grab a Finder alternative such as ' Path Finder' which does have the ability to print folder views.īesides third-party solutions, the only easy solution in OS X is to copy a folder's contents and paste it into a plain text document in a program such as TextEdit. There is a 'Print' command in the Finder, but this will open a document in the preferred application and try to print it from there instead of printing the current folder view.

Unfortunately there is no way to do this directly in the Finder. Periodically you may have a collection of files that you may wish to catalog by printing a list of the file names out on a per-directory basis, or by saving the name list in a document.