Question about Files and Copying (In large amounts.)

[Shadow Fox]

Hi!
Working on a little project, and I'm curious about a few things that I could use some assistance on.

Is there a way to copy file names, without the data they hold? (Hopefully by mass; Such as, thousands of files that are only a few kilobytes in size.)

Because doing this by hand, file-to-file, some 6,000 times, is going to take a ridiculous amount of time.

[IRunSoFarAway]

Copy Entire List of Files
Step 1
Hold the "Shift" key, right-click the folder containing a list of files and select "Open Command Window Here."

Step 2
Type "dir /b > filenames.txt" (without quotation marks) in the Command Prompt window. Press "Enter."

Step 3
Double-click the "filenames.txt" file from the previously selected folder to see a list of file names in that folder.

Step 4
Press "Ctrl-A" and then "Ctrl-C" to copy the list of file names to your clipboard.

Tip

When you're ready to paste the file names, click your paste location in the appropriate program and press "Ctrl-V."



http://smallbusiness.chron.com/copy-...rer-53696.html

Any help?

[Shadow Fox]

Copy Entire List of Files
Step 1
Hold the "Shift" key, right-click the folder containing a list of files and select "Open Command Window Here."

Step 2
Type "dir /b > filenames.txt" (without quotation marks) in the Command Prompt window. Press "Enter."

Step 3
Double-click the "filenames.txt" file from the previously selected folder to see a list of file names in that folder.

Step 4
Press "Ctrl-A" and then "Ctrl-C" to copy the list of file names to your clipboard.

Tip

When you're ready to paste the file names, click your paste location in the appropriate program and press "Ctrl-V."



http://smallbusiness.chron.com/copy-...rer-53696.html

Any help?

Up until your Step 4.
While the names got copied to clipboard, when I try to paste, nothing happens, and the option via Rick-clight for Paste is greyed out.

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

Can you paste them to another program?

[Shadow Fox]

Can you paste them to another program?

Can't copy into a program, into File Explorer, or Desktop.
Able to Copy all of the files, just can't Paste any of them; Unless done per individual file.

[Perryn]

Sounds like you want to create empty copies of the files, not just a list of the file names? Ie, you want the file song.mp3 to still be present but be a 0kb file?

If so the above won't work, it will simply generate a listing of files. You can create an empty file with "copy /y NUL EmptyFile.txt >NUL" in cmd but to replace emptyfile.txt with the names of each file existing somewhere would take some batch scripting, unless there are programs out there that can do it.

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

Just to make sure, you are copying the output of the file?

If I run dir /b > filelist.txt I get a text file that contains the names of the files in the folder which I can copy from.