Is there a program that can read your book file names and make a list?

[GatorDeb]

Let's say I have a folder with all my books, and they have the format Name - Author.prc. Is there a program that will grab that and import into a database automatically with an author and title field?

Thanks!

[daffy4u]

I believe the very scary NetSlut is trying to design such a program now. You can read about it here.

[kacir]

Originally Posted by GatorDeb

Let's say I have a folder with all my books, and they have the format Name - Author.prc. Is there a program that will grab that and import into a database automatically with an author and title field?

Thanks!

What operating system do you use?

If it is Windows do following:
Click on start menu
click on Run
type:
cmd
into the text field and press enter.

Now use cd command to switch to the directory where your books are located
Like this
cd "C:\Documents and Settings"
(if your files are located no D: or other drive you have to type D: on the commandline first)
(use dir command or dir /w command to see the filenames)
cd "John Smith"
cd books
(you need to use quotes "" around the directory name if it contains spaces)
now when you are in the directory, type
dir > my_list_of_books.txt
Now edit your list of books in the text editor or use word processor to write a macro or use some search and replace magic.

If you use Linux or MacOSX you use command ls instead of dir

If you want the dir command to list also the files in your subdirectories, use
dir /s > my_list_of_books.txt
or
dir /s /b > my_list_of_books.txt

see
dir /? for other interesting options
(or man ls if you use linux or MacOSX)

If you are scarred to use commandline, install Totalcommander from
http://www.ghisler.com/
and install addon called
Catalog
or
DiskDir
or
DiskDir Extended
from
http://www.ghisler.com/plugins.htm
You can install the addon just by clicking on the zip file with addon in the TotalCommander


The resulting file can be imported to Excel or OpenOffice.org Calc
If you want to import plain text file into OpenOffice.org Calc call the file list_of_my_files_or_other_name.csv

[Slite]

Originally Posted by GatorDeb

Let's say I have a folder with all my books, and they have the format Name - Author.prc. Is there a program that will grab that and import into a database automatically with an author and title field?

Thanks!

I use DirPrinting (freeware) for just this purpose until Netslut finishes the software I hope he is working hard on

This program prints the filenames
from your selected folder to a textfile, and then I import that file into Excel so I can delete unwanted data and sort on author/filename etc. That works due to the fact that I use a different directory for each author in the format Last Name, First Name and then put the books in there.

Link to dirprinting:

http://www.majusoft.de/DirPrinting/index_en.htm

[bbusybookworm]

I've been using this program LS File List Generator.

It's a small lightweight program which does not require any installation and allows you to generate the list as a Text, Csv or Html file.

The Html is really useful as it creates hyper links to the files itself so you can launch them easily.

I've had it in my digital toolkit for years.

The Only problem I ran into was finding a working mirror of it as the main authors site appears to have gone down.

You can find it here

[pilotbob]

Originally Posted by GatorDeb

Let's say I have a folder with all my books, and they have the format Name - Author.prc. Is there a program that will grab that and import into a database automatically with an author and title field?

Thanks!

You could probably write a quick batch file to add your books to calibre. There is a command line way to do it now which was added so the bookit FireFox plugin could use it. If you're interested I could try to whip one up this weekend.

You "may" be able to move this into mobipocket reader... not sure if you consider that a database.

BOb

EDIT: What exactly do you mean by a "database"?

[kovidgoyal]

calibre already can read metadata from file names in a customizable way. see the advanced section of the config dialog.