[members at lugog] Printing a Folder's Contents

[Ian Dickinson]

Hi David,

> When I open a Family History Folder Icon which I have on my monitor, it
> shows another Folder Icon, inside which I have 80 Census Transcriptions and
> 'Originals' files, each shown as a File Icon . I am able to show these files
> as a 'List', and I have been trying to find the 'correct' click to be able
> to print this list, but as yet I haven't done so.

I'm afraid I don't use Mint, so I can't advise on how to do what you
want via a menu in the user interface. The good news, however, is that
you can do what you want easily from the command line.

Bring up a terminal window, change (i.e. cd) to the directory you want
to print a listing of, and type:

ls | lpr

If you're not familiar with the command line, this deconstructs as:

* 'ls' is the 'list the contents of this directory' command. Type just
ls on its own to see the files listed in the terminal. You can
additional arguments to modify the listing: 'ls -l' shows the long
form listing including sizes and permissions, 'ls -sh' lists the files
with sizes in "human-readable form (4.0K, 1.2M, etc). Type 'man ls' to
see a full list of the options

* 'lpr' is the command to send a file to the default printer.

* '|' (pronounced 'pipe') is the vertical bar character
(shift-backslash on most UK keyboards), which pipes the output of one
command to the input of the next. So you're piping the output of the
directory listing to the input of the 'print this file' command, thus
printing the listing that you want.

There are other variants to this pattern. If you want to edit the list
of files before you print them, you could

ls > my-files.txt
gedit my-files.txt

which will save the output of the ls command to a new file named
'my-files.txt', and then open that file up in a graphical editor, from
which you can edit the listing and then print the file. I'm guessing
that you have gedit installed on your system, you may need to pick a
different text editor program but the principle is the same

Hope that helps,
Ian