How to print a list of files in a Windows directory

Posted on May 1, 2008 at 5:20 am

Have you ever had the situation where you needed to print a list of all of the files in a folder? That might not be too hard to manually handle if you have a just a few files, but what if you have hundreds of files all with strange and complicated names? On top of that, what if you wanted to print a list of all files in a directory and all sub-directories of that directory?

Well that’s not an easy task without some freeware Windows utilities. You can also capture a screenshot, but that’s not useful if someone needs the list in Excel or as a text file. And a screen shot usually doesn’t look as nice as printing a text file.

No worries! You can use Karen’s Directory Printer to print out the entire directory tree structure with as many file attributes as you want, including fields like date created, date last modified, file size, file name, folder name, and lots more!

I love this program because it has a crap load of options that make it the only program you will ever need to print lists of files in directories.

Pick your folder and choose whether you want to print file names only, folder names only, or both. You can also tell it to search sub folders and print them out also.

Clicking on the Show Network checkbox will allow you to see all network drives and shares and print out their structures too! Great for office networks that have folder shares on servers.

You can also sort by file name, file extension, file size, date created, date modified and more. You can also put a file filter so that only certain types of files are printed, such as images only, sound files, executables, documents, etc.

Finally, you can choose from a large number of attributes that you want to include in your file print list:

Finally, one other great feature of the program is that it adds an option to your Explorer context menu so that you can simply right-click on any folder and choose “Print with DirPrn“.

Overall, it’s a useful application in certain situations. I’ve personally used it a couple of times and it’s been the absolute perfect tool. On other thing to note, there are two tabs that do the same thing, Print and Save To Disk, except that the latter allows you to save the list out as a text file. Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: print file directory, print directory to file, print files in directory, print list of files in directory, print all files in a directory, print a list of files in a directory

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9 Responses to “How to print a list of files in a Windows directory”

Madhur Kapoor said on : May 1st, 2008 at 12:01 pm

This will be useful in my project work.

akishore said on : May 1st, 2008 at 12:15 pm

Madhur, it’s been very useful for me! I guess because I work in IT, I always seem to be needing to print out a list of all files on a network share! Glad it helped you too!

Ajay said on : May 2nd, 2008 at 2:41 am

this would be very use ful in my project also. most of time i write all files in a word file and then take a print of all file names .
tahnks

Gururaj said on : May 2nd, 2008 at 3:12 am

Karen’s applications are all great but does one really need a full-blown application just to print a list of files? If you need a list of files in your folder “december”:
1) Type cmd and hit Enter after you click RUN from the Start Menu
2) Type cd c:\december
3) Type dir > filelist.txt
That should give you a detailed list of files.

akishore said on : May 2nd, 2008 at 9:14 am

Hi Gururaj, you’re absolutely correct! It’s overkill, but I think the programs come in handy in that you don’t have to know DOS commands, which very few people know unless they are technically savvy.

You and me might be able to do this, but others will have no clue, so I guess that’s the only reason for them.

Nirmal said on : May 3rd, 2008 at 11:41 am

Great find Aseem, I have encountered this situation for my office work I had to print lot of documents and I had to do it manually one by one. I’ll try this one.