08-01-2010, 06:58 PM

I have many avi files for which i want to just copy/ extract just the names and paste them into say a spreadsheet.. I tried word, iwork and nothing seems to work.. it copies the entire avi video.. I want only the titles..

How to do this in say a batch form instead of each individually using get info would take way to long

08-02-2010, 07:56 AM

Usually if I need a listing of all of a given file - and hopefully they're all in one directory or one hierarchy of directories - I:

Open a terminal (Applications -> utilities -> terminal)
Change directory to where my files are (easy way is to in a finder window, navigate to the folder containing your videos and in the terminal type: cd <space> (don't hit enter yet) and in the finder window at the top where it says the folder name your looking at, click and hold on the little folder icon and drag it into the terminal window and release the mouse button - it should have now filled in the full path in terminal. In the terminal window now press enter.)
Then do an ls feeding the output to a text file so: ls >mymovies.txt

If you have your video files stored in subfolders within that top folder you could do:

ls -R > mymovies.txt

Now you should have a text file in your movie folder that contains a listing of all of your files (with some additional text, but it's at least a starting point)

08-02-2010, 10:18 AM

Note that -R stands for recursive and it will list any subdirectory as well ... handy, but you might just want to get a list of the current directory, in which case just use ls without the -R tag.