Replacement for Tanaka's MT List Files?

[mojojones]

I’m porting a large AppleScript to OS X and am trying to replace the functions of Tanaka’s MT List Files and MT List Folders commands. Those were great because you could retrieve a list of files of a particular file type from all sub folders in one line without having to loop or walk thru them. Does anyone know of a way to do this in OS X with the same ease?

Thanks,

John

[Rob]

Satimage osax has a list files command that will work recursively.

list files: the list of the files contained in the folder (defined in: Satimage.osax)
list files alias – a folder
[recursively boolean] – default: true
[invisibles boolean] – default: false
Result: list of alias

It might also be possible to use shell scripting but I have nothing to offer since I’m still a relative noob in the shell.

– Rob

[Plaid_Cow_Solutions]

If all of the files have the correct extension, then the unix find command would be a good choice:

find ~/Documents/ -name ‘*.xls’

for example, would find all xls files in the Documents directory in the user’s home.

I would suggest playing with the script in the terminal before trying to write it in AppleScript.

[jonn8]

This sort of works for me:

set the_folder to (path to “docs”)
set the_files to paragraphs of (do shell script “find " & (quoted form of POSIX path of the_folder) & " -name ‘*.xls’”)

–this script was automatically tagged for
–color coded syntax by Script to Markup Code

I say sort of because the result returns an extra forward slash after the Documents folder (e.g., “/Users/jon/Documents//MyFile.xls”). Also, from this list, if you aren’t passing this to other shell scripts, you’ll probably still need to traverse the list to convert to Mac-style colon delineated paths. Find is very powerful and defaults to go all the way down a directory path to all subfolders. To limit to just the folder specified, add the “-maxdepth 1” flag. Other flags can also be added to find files based on size or date or more powerful regex.

Jon

[Ray_Barber]

Jon, try this to rid yourself of the additional slash…

set the_folder to (path to “docs”)
set the_files to paragraphs of (do shell script “find " & (quoted form of POSIX path of the_folder) & " -name ‘*.xls’ | tr -s ‘/’”)
→ {“/Users/myusername/Documents/FLDS1.xls”}

from man tr…

The -s option squeezes multiple occurrences of the characters listed in the last operand (either string1 or string2) in the input into a single instance of the character. This occurs after all deletion and translation is completed.

[jonn8]

Thanks, Greg. Anyone know why we get the double forward slash in the first place?

Jon

[Ray_Barber]

Once again with a ‘colon deliniated’ path…

set the_folder to (path to “docs”)
set the_files to paragraphs of (do shell script “find " & (quoted form of POSIX path of the_folder) & " -name ‘*.xls’ | tr -s ‘/’ | sed -e ‘s///:/g’”)
–>{“:Users:myusername:Documents:FLDS1.xls”}

[Ray_Barber]

It looks like “POSIX path” is putting a / at the end. In the terminal.app you can use this and it will not give you the double slashes…

find '/Users/myusername/Documents' -name '*.xls'
-->/Users/myusername/Documents/FLDS1.xls
--but if you use ...
/Users/myusername/Documents/ -- it will show the double slashes
-->/Users/myusername/Documents//FLDS1.xls