File Lister for Windows

File Lister from SnakeByte Studios is compact, free, portable, extremely flexible, and capable of doing lots of cool things. But it's not for everybody; it's a powerful tool for the more advanced user. Frustration with file listers that wouldn't traverse subdirectories led to the development of File Lister. Like its competitors, File Lister creates lists of files that you can save and process with other applications, but File Lister not only traverses subdirectories but also renames files, changes their attributes, matches files, generates hashes, and more.

File Lister's compact interface has a basic but logical and efficient layout, with entry fields for file path, search pattern, output format, and output to file as well as a variety of check boxes and drop-down lists. The only real icon is an open box linking the drag-and-drop search feature, an interesting tool that lets you drag files and folders from Explorer (or other file browsers) and drop them into the box for automatic searching and listing, even with large directories. The Regex check box specifies regular expressions for matching, while the Traverse Subdirectories check box is selected by default. File Lister can search and list files across hundreds of subdirectories quickly and automatically. The Output section let us copy files to the Clipboard as well as enter or browse to an output file. Check boxes let us append, open, execute, and buffer the output; these are useful options, particularly for very large batches. Following the excellent online tutorial, we added a batch of digital snapshots, specified searching only for images, and selected an output format. We opted to rename our files, adding new sequential numbering via an easy-to-use wizard, and also to change some attributes, selecting from an extensive drop-down list in the Output Format section. Clicking Run created a batch file that processed our files and saved them to a new directory when we clicked it. That sounds like a lot of steps, but the alternative is to do it all the hard way, which is a lot more work and prone to errors.

This compact but effective tool belongs in every power user's portable toolkit. And, if there's something you think File Lister should do but doesn't, the publisher wants to hear from you.