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How to Make a Print-out of Your Drive's Directory Structure

Copyright 2004 John M. Hanevy 

A common problem many people face eventually is trying to find 

a file buried somewhere on their hard drive. They haven't used, 

or needed, the file in a while and they forget exactly where it 

is. So they end up clicking on likely locations until they find 

it, or they use the "find" feature of Windows. Either way can be 

very time consuming if you have a very large hard drive. Wouldn't 

it be nice to have a printable directory of all the files in a 

particular folder? You can easily do this using DOS.

The command to do this is 'tree', 'tree' in its most basic form 

will provide you with the arrangement of Folders and Sub-Folders 

on your drive, or within a particular folder. If you are currently 

in the C:, then 'tree' will give you a list of all the folders and 

sub-folders on that drive. However, you can do much more with this 

command by using 'switches'.

The /f switch will give you the names of the files in each folder 

and sub-folder directory. Your list will show a series of lines 

indicating the folder structure. Some older printers may not be able 

to handle the special graphics characters used--for these printers 

you must also add the /a switch.

In both of the above cases the results will be scrolled on your 

screen--useful, but we can do better. To send the output to a 

non-graphics printer we can use the redirection switch, >. The 

redirection switch can also be used to send the output to a file 

for future reference! This file can be printed out later if desired. 

The syntax to use at the Command Prompt to print a directory listing 

of all files and folders within the Windows directory is : 

tree c:windows /f /a >prn

If we wanted to do the same thing for all of C:, and we are already 

in that directory : tree /f /a >prn

If we want to save the results to a file :

tree /f /a >filename.txt  

will save the results in the current directory. 

Instead of going to the command prompt and typing in the command and 

switches every time, it is useful to make a Batch file that we can 

copy to whatever directory we want to index.

Making Batch files is very simple, and can be useful to automate frequently 

performed tasks. Simply open up your text editor, then type in the commands : 

tree /f /a >filename.txt, then save it with the bat extension. You will see 

a special icon to indicate that is a batch file if you have done it properly. 

Choose a filename that is not likely to be used by any other programs--or you 

may overwrite something you wanted to keep! Once you have made the batch file, 

simply copy/paste it in the directory you want to index, then run it. Renaming 

the file with the date is a good idea if you frequently update that particular 

directory.

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