Depending on what you're after, terminal can do this for you quite
nicely.
Open terminal, and then change to the folder you'd like to have the
list of files created in.
Next, type a simple ls -1 and you'll get a list of all files in that
folder.
If you want it to show hidden files as well, then add a -a to the
command line.
Note, the -1 makes each file name on a separate line.
If you'd like normal ls information (name, sice, date, permissions,
then leave off the -1 and you'll get all information shown.
If you'd like to find specific files (I.E. those with .zip
extensions), then simply do something like:
ls *.zip
and ls will show only the zip files.
Now, if you'd like something showing all files under the current
folder as well, then things get more complicated.
You can do an ls -R to show all files and their subfolders, but if
you're looking for a particular file, it might be easier to pipe the
ls output to the grep command, or use find instead to locate the file
in question.
find ./|grep zip
will show all files at and below the current file level, including all
subfolders, and any and all matches for what comes after the grep
command.
The benefit of find over ls is twofold. First, find shows entire
paths (I.E. /Users/tsiegel/downloads/file1.zip, instead of just
file1.zip as the ls command would do, and two, it will (by default)
search each and every file at or below the current folder, matching
the zip wildcard, regardless of where it is in the filename. So, if
you had a file named zipper1.txt and zipper2.jpg, the find command
would locate both of these files, whereas the ls *.zip command would
only find those with a zip extension. Of ourse, you could adjust your
ls command accordingly, but sometimes it's difficult to get
satisfactory results from the ls command if your search criteria are
complex.
For instance, I can pipe find through multiple grep commands if needed
to get very specific results.
Let's say I have files that are named by date, but I only want the zip
files with such a date.
I could do something like this:
find ./ |grep zip|grep 02012014
and the files output would only be the one one matching files with
02012014 in their name, and also having a .zip extension.
This would show me all 02012014 files with zip extensions, regardless
of what the file name actually was. For instance, hijack audio has a
name function that tacks on dates to recordings, in addition to their
names. Using this search command, I'd see all of those such as
02012014-first_file.zip and firstfile-01022014.zip without having to
specify where in the filename the 02012014 might be located, which is
a bit more difficult using just a plain ls command.
This of course, only displays the results, it won't do anything else
with them, but if you need to see them in a list and be able to edit
them (like to remove files you want not to show up in your text
listing) then you can simply put a >out.txt after the rest of the
command, and your output (all of it) will be dumped into a file called
out.txt which you can open with text edit with the command
open -e out.txt
whereupon osx will open text edit, and load the out.txt file into the
editor ready for your modifications or viewing pleasure.
It's very easy to build up a series of these linked commands to
manipulate output, so you get only the results you want to see and
work with, but just be aware that each time you add another vertical
bar and another command to the command line, you're extending the time
it takes to run the commands, especially since find works on each and
every file, regardless of whether it's one you wanted to see or not,
it's only the grep commands that shrink the output so you don't get
thousands of files wizzing across your screen.
You can of course accomplish the same thing with any number of strung
together commands, it all depends on exactly what it is you'd like to
see as the final output.
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