There are many ways to get files & folder details from SharePoint (programmatically) but my manager asked me to provide the list of folders and sub folders from a SharePoint document library urgently. So I wanted get an idea to provide the information quickly, after spending few minutes on the web and found this post (I know about the DIR command but didn’t think about the SharePoint UNC). Yes, we can get the details using DOS command with UNC path. 🙂

First of all, we want to know about UNC and the DIR command.

UNC: Universal Naming Convention, a format for specifying the location of resources on a local-area network (LAN). Read more about this here.

Syntax: \\<servername>\<sharename>\<directory>

DIR: Display a list of files and subfolders. Read more about this here.

Syntax: DIR [pathname(s)] [display_format] [file_attributes] [sorted] [time] [options]

To get SharePoint UNC path, just remove http: from the SharePoint url and replace the forward slash with backslash. So my document library path is:

http://ServerName/doccenter/Administration/StepBiStep

then it’s UNC will be like this:

\\ServerName\doccenter\Administration\StepBiStep

Okay.. we will see the steps here, I have created a document library (StepBiStep) for testing purpose.

Step 1: Open the cmd prompt

Step 2: type the following statement in the command-line and press Enter key.

DIR /B /A:D / S [UNC Path] > [File Name]

– /B -Bare format (no heading, file sizes or summary)
– /A:D -Folder file attributes
– /S -Include all subfolders
– [UNC Path] -The path, which you want to get all the folders and subfolders
– [File Name] -A text file name to store the folder details

So our command is looks like this, I have used a text file (FolderLists.txt, which is located in C: drive) to store the details.

DIR /b /A:D /S \\ServerName\doccenter\Administration\StepBiStep > c:\FolderLists.txt

Step 3: It will take few minutes to generate the list. You can open in a Notepad and see..!.

That’s all guys, enjoy!  I do welcome your comments. Please leave them here! 🙂

References:

1. http://ss64.com/nt/dir.html

2. http://www.sharepointgeoff.com/how-to-quickly-list-documents-and-sub-folders-from-a-document-library-in-sharepoint-to-a-file/

3. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc939978.aspx