Output Filenames in a Folder to a Text File

Question

Using Windows Command Prompt or Windows PowerShell, how can I output all the file names in a single directory to a text file, without the file extension?

In Command Prompt, I was using:

dir /b > files.txt

Result

01 - Prologue.mp3
02 - Title.mp3
03 - End.mp3
files.txt

Desired Output

01 - Prologue
02 - Title
03 - End

Notice the "dir /b > files.txt" command includes the file extension and puts the filename at the bottom.

Without using a batch file, is there a clean Command Prompt or PowerShell command that can do what I'm looking for?

Misogamy

Answer 1

In PowerShell:

# Get-ChildItem (gci) is PowerShell's dir equivalent.
# -File limits the output to files.
# .BaseName extracts the file names without extension.
(Get-ChildItem -File).BaseName | Out-File files.txt

^{Note: You can use dir in PowerShell too, where it is simply an alias of Get-ChildItem. However, to avoid confusion with cmd.exe's internal dir command, which has fundamentally different syntax, it's better to use the PowerShell-native alias, gci. To see all aliases defined for Get-ChildItem, run
Get-Alias -Definition Get-ChildItem}

Note that use of PowerShell's > redirection operator - which is effectively an alias of the
Out-File cmdlet - would also result in the undesired inclusion of the output, files.txt, in the enumeration, as in cmd.exe and POSIX-like shells such as bash, because the target file is created first.

By contrast, use of a pipeline with Out-File (or Set-Content, for text input) delays file creation until the cmdlet in this separate pipeline segment is initialized^[1] - and because the file enumeration in the first segment has by definition already completed by that point, due to the Get-ChildItem call being enclosed in (...), the output file is not included in the enumeration.

Also note that property access .BaseName was applied to all files returned by (Get-ChildItem ...), which conveniently resulted in an array of the individual files' property values being returned, thanks to a feature called member-access enumeration.

Character-encoding note:

• In Windows PowerShell, Out-File / > creates "Unicode" (UTF-16LE) files, whereas Set-Content uses the system's legacy ANSI code page.

• In PowerShell (Core) 7+, BOM-less UTF-8 is the consistent default.

The -Encoding parameter can be used to control the encoding explicitly.

---

^{[1] In the case of Set-Content, it is actually delayed even further, namely until the first input object is received, but that is an implementation detail that shouldn't be relied on.}

Keary

Great answer. Thanks for the detail and explanation. I ended up using (Get-ChildItem -File).BaseName | Out-File files.txt -Encoding utf8, as UTF-8 encoding is important to me. Thanks for pointing out the -Encoding parameter. – Misogamy

Glad to hear it helped, @GTSJoe; my pleasure, and thanks for a well-formulated question. Please see my latest updates re aliases and the feature called member enumeration. – Keary