New Folder Wizard Makes Bulk Folder Creation Effortless

Pretty good utility. I never did get to grips with the more complicated commandline stuff.
Very simple scripts is about all I can do so this will be good for when I need it.
I would like to see more of that commandline stuff as given here in the comments though, I would rathe rlearn how to do it from the basics instead of 'needing' to use a GIU for everything...

Pretty cool. If you're using Windows Vista or Windows 7, you can also use this trick to add the program to your Explorer context menu (so you can right-click where you want to create the folders and launch the program):

[www.askvg.com]

Note: I'm not affiliated with the linked site at all. Just found it with a search. :-)

Walter Glenn

@Jason: Since the profiled program will take input from a text file, you could still use your Excel files. Export to a text file and create the folders with the program.

Walter Glenn

Jason: Hmmm . . . this looks pretty cool. Normally I use Excel

This can be done with a perl 1 liner.

perl -e "foreach my $num (1..10) {mkdir qq[asdf$num]}"

/it takes another line to pad the numbers, if you want

designed.com: files: a01, a02, a03, b01, b02, b03, c01, c02, c03
auto create folders: a, b, c with respective files in them

I have a perl script that does that as well

/regex match for alpha characters in the file name.
/create a directory based on the alpha character
/copy file(s) into that dir
/if no alpha characters were found, copy into the tilde "~" directory.

/sorting random downloads

New Folder Wizard is a tiny-158k

perl.exe is 45 KB :D

@Suresh_Ponnusamy: Of course, you would want to replace rmdir with mkdir or md. And this doesn't create 0-padded number sequences.

penguiniator

Well,

If you are a little versatile with windows command prompt, a simple for loop would do the perfectly for most of the cases.

Like creating directories from a text file or just normal numbered directories.

example: for creating a set of 100 directories with the names TestFolder 1,2,3 etc,. use:

for /L %v in (1,1,100) do @rmdir "TestFolder %v"

Simple isn't???

Lifehacker should post more of such things.

Well no offense to anyone. This is a good app for layman computer users who are stuck with related requirements.

Peace.

Suresh_Ponnusamy

I use the Excel method for this, combining a filldown series with concatenate. It's also good when setting up a batch rename of a series of files with inconvenient names, such as ripped tracks from a CD. For simple name changes of pre-existing files, the DOS rename command is pretty good. A series of files with names such as: "some_inconvenient_filename_track-001.ext" from -001 to -024 can be changed with

rename some_inconvenient_filename_track*.ext track*.ext

Rename will preserve whatever is in the wildcard for the original files.

DanYHKim

@DiscoZombie: And Bulk Rename Utility will happily rename them for you.

RobinSure

@Jason: Yep, Excel or OpenOffice. Making a batch file makes much more sense, it's not hard to figure out, and you already have the apps needed.
@designed.com: You can get a program like Directory Lister to list everything you're interested in, dump it into excel, slice and dice as needed.
Remember that using a tab as a delimiter in a text file will turn into separate cells in excel just by copying and pasting.
And it's a good idea to name the text file "_bat.txt", change it to ".bat", run it, then change the name back to "_bat.txt" - keeps you from accidentally redoing an awful lot of stuff if you accidentally double-click.

sunglint

for n in {1..100}; do
mkdir $(printf 'lifehacker %03d' $n)
done

Or, for the case where your folder names are stored in a file:

mkdir $(cat folders.txt)

There's probably shorter ways of doing the first one with brace expansion, but this works. And if you can do this, you can do a hundred other things that require similar sequences that this utility can't handle, like storing files in those hundred folders, or reading the files in them.

The more you know about your computer, the less need for single-purpose, seldom-used utilities like this.

penguiniator

@DiscoZombie: Ah, I was unaware of what ABFR8 was. You could just delete, it wouldn't be too difficult, but I can be very lazy :P

of course this assumes that you use ABFR8. Don't know why anyone wouldn't since it's the best file & folder mass-renaming tool out there for Macs. I don't personally have a need to rename many folders, but I use it on big batches of files all the time. You can do just files, just folders, or both, with just about any pattern you can think up.

DiscoZombie

@Jason: +1 for the Excel method. Of course any spreadsheet with an Auto-fill feature can do this, so the on line versions have an advantage - ultra portable and no .NET!

quadrupole

@Phoshi: "Try creating, say, 127 folders all called "folder number X is lol", it would be difficult"

Just delete what you don't need, and use ABFR8 for your naming pattern. (On a Mac anyway, I don't know if they make ABFR for Win)

DiscoZombie

@DiscoZombie: However, it's only easy to create power-of-2 numbers via this method. Try creating, say, 127 folders all called "folder number X is lol", it would be difficult :(

@sagetyrtle: Whoops - I just realised that #1 is actually incorporated into the script in #2. So ignore #1! Hee. Sorry about that.

sagetyrtle

I often want to create a new folder while I'm in the Save File dialogue box.

In AutoHotKey, I've done the following:

1) mapped the righthand control key to:

~RCtrl::Send ^+{Tab}

(this gets me from the file field to the dialogue box field)

2) written this script:

f11::Send ^+{Tab}{APPSKEY}wf

Which creates the new folder.

I never have to touch the mouse, and I use this script three times a day, at least.

sagetyrtle

BTW, the doubling method I described, whipped me up 1000 folders in less than ten seconds, for those that might think "it's too much work".

DiscoZombie

The old rule of doubling.

Create a folder. Copy / Paste.
Select All, Copy / Paste.
Repeat.

Won't take long before you're creating billions of folders.

Then use ABFR8 to set your naming pattern, and hit the button.

DiscoZombie

This sounds worthwhile just to avoid using the command line fu I had played with to do this when I was trying to create over 100 folders with entirely unique names. It took about five minutes to figure out and five minutes to execute, but since I'm not a command line wiz (actually I hate it) memorizing it would take me some time and I don't like having notes around for such things. I'm gonna probably give this a whirl. Of course, I'll wait to see what the brilliant LH crowd suggests as alternatives first.

jupiterthunder

It would be really nice if this thing could identify "patterns" in filenames and create sub folders for each set. Anyone know of an app like that?

files: a01, a02, a03, b01, b02, b03, c01, c02, c03
auto create folders: a, b, c with respective files in them

This isn't really a huge need for me... I've got cygwin. Or Heck, you could probably script up something to do it for you in Windows Powershell if you're not wanting to cart along all the cygwin extras.

Hmmm . . . this looks pretty cool. Normally I use Excel for something like this. Create all the "names" I want, or paste them from another list, and then concatenate them together with the "md" command (make directory).

So, column A could be filled with numbers, names, letters, whatever the variable part of the folder title was going to be.
001
002
003
etc

Then, in column B you'd copy and paste a formula:

="md "&"""day "&A1&" results"""

which would resolve to:

md "day 001 results"
md "day 002 results"
md "day 003 results"

copy this list into notepad, save it as a BAT file, and run it in the folder where you want the files.

Yes, I agree that in the individual case the profiled program is likely faster, but this is a relatively infrequent need for me, and the flexibility of using anything in an excel spreadsheet as the source is sometimes useful (you could still use this program to paste them into a text file).

Cool program nonetheless!

--Jason

Jason