listing all files on hard drive?

[wwwusuario1]

How can you list ALL the files on your computer in a single list that you can sort and/or edit using Excel and that includes file size and location, etc.?

(This was easy in the old MS DOS days, but a way to do this in Windows eludes me. I don't know how to get My Computer or Windows Explorer to show me the whole tree of files, and their displays can't be cut and pasted or otherwise edited and saved. Am I missing something obvious. . . ?)

I'm using Windows XP Pro and Office Pro.

In advance, thank you.

[DMR]

Hi wwwusuario1, welcome to DaniWeb :)

Using DOS is still one easy way of doing what you want to do:

1. Open an MS-DOS box:

- Click on the "Run..." option in your Start menu
- In the resulting "Open:" box, type the following and then click "OK":

CMD

2. At the command prompt in the DOS window:

- Type CD C:\ and then hit Enter.
- Type dir /A/S >AllFiles.txt and then hit Enter.

The above version of the dir command will create a text file named "AllFiles.txt" in your C:\ directory which contains a listing, by directory, of all files on your C: drive. The default listing will include each file's date/time stamp and size, but you can modify which file attributes are included by adding the apprpriate switches to the dir command (type dir /? for help on that).

3. The contents of the AllFiles.txt file can then be imported into an Excel worksheet if you want to manipulate the individual filedata, although you should be aware that the entire contents of the file may not fit onto one worksheet:

- Open a new worksheet in Excel.
- Under the "Data" menu, go to Import External Data->Import Data...
- In the resulting Select Data Source window, navigate to the C:\AllFiles.txt file and double-click on it to begin the import process.
- Follow the prompts during the import to format the data to your liking.

[tayspen]

Nice DMR, didnt know you could do that.

-T

[DMR]

Yeah- old tricks tricks from The Deep Dark Days of DOS :mrgreen:

What surprised me was how well Excel dealt with the imported data from the text file. It sort of fscked header and summary info, but the actual filenames and attributes fall into the rows and columns pretty nicely.

[jaishankar]

Yeah- old tricks tricks from The Deep Dark Days of DOS :mrgreen:

What surprised me was how well Excel dealt with the imported data from the text file. It sort of fscked header and summary info, but the actual filenames and attributes fall into the rows and columns pretty nicely.

Yes tayspen only DMR can do that