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I'm currently using the command
find /Volumes/DriveName > driveName.txt
to create a file listing of all files that are on the drive.
How could I modify my command (or what would be a better command) to have the list not include any dot files, for example ._Filename or .DSstore?
I'm not looking for software like CDFinder etcetera to keep a searchable database. I need a text output that contains all the files on the disk, as well as their relative locations to each other.
To exclude files and directories add an exclusion pattern to the find command (see info find for more):
find /Volumes/DriveName -not -path '*/.*' > driveName.txt
ls -R /Volumes/DriveName > driveName.txt depending on the output format you want.
Jul 13, 2012 at 22:49
-name only checks the filename, to match against the whole path replace -name with -path and the pattern with '*/.*'.
This isn't remotely Mac-specific, but you can pipe your output through grep. More particularly, the -v option will exclude lines that match the pattern you are looking for (in your case, filenames beginning with a .).
So instead of
find /Volumes/DriveName > driveName.txt
you can enter
find /Volumes/DriveName | grep -v '\/\.' > driveName.txt
I was going to recommend tree as an alternative, but I realized it's not installed by default on OS X. However if you don't mind following some straightforward instructions to compile it yourself, it might be a useful tool for your purposes. It takes any directory and gives you a nice ASCII based tree of all the subfolders and files therein (and by default it omits hidden/dot files).
Sample output:
~$ tree test
test
├── alpha
│ ├── testA
│ ├── testB
│ └── testC
├── num
│ ├── test1
│ ├── test2
│ └── test3
├── test X
├── test Y
└── test Z
You can use ListAllFiles from the App Store.
