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My apologies if this has been asked before. I am using Ubuntu 16.04.3 desktop and would like to be able to output the contents (file names) of a directory into a single text file via terminal/cli.

I think when I used to use DOS, years back, went something like this: dir /w/p > file.txt ..think that was it, but simple and damn handy

Thank you for your time and help with my question

Sean S
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1 Answers1

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The general command for listing directory contents in Linux is ls

LS(1)                            User Commands                           LS(1)

NAME
       ls - list directory contents

SYNOPSIS
       ls [OPTION]... [FILE]...

DESCRIPTION
       List  information  about  the FILEs (the current directory by default).
       Sort entries alphabetically if none of -cftuvSUX nor --sort  is  speci‐
       fied.

Probably the nearest equivalent to dir /w will be ls -C (the /p option - pause - doesn't really make sense when writing to a file). So

ls -C > file.txt

In fact, there's a dir command in Linux as well - so you could just do dir > file.txt

See Difference between 'dir' and 'ls' terminal commands?

steeldriver
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  • Thank you for your help steeldriver, appreciate it. Very true about the /p option, just so use to using it to pause dir output. Take care and thank you again ;) – Sean S Feb 28 '18 at 02:10