Because I've been playing around with it recently, I thought I would see what R could do to help me. I've got a ways to go, but it looks like R has a great function that can put the specifics of a file within a data set, file.info.
file.info("C:\\users\\doug shartzer\\messy folder\\song1.mp3")
Additionally, you can provide file.info with more than one file at a time within a vector. In fact, you can pass it an entire folder using the dir function on a folder, which will create a vector containing all the files within the provided folder. Be sure to use the full.names argument on the dir function to get the full path, which file.info needs.
file.info(dir("c:\\users\\doug shartzer\\messy folder\\",full.names=T))
What's even better? You can provide the dir function with a vector of folder names to get a giant dataset of file details with just one line of code. It also has a recursive argument that'll include files within each folder's subfolder.
file.info(dir(c("c:\\","d:\\","e:\\"), full.names=T, recursive=T)
Lastly, dir also allows you to limit your list further by accepting regular expressions in its pattern argument to limit the list of files returned. I can limit my list of files to just pictures and music files.
file.info(dir(c('c:\\','d:\\','e:\\'),recursive=T,full.names=T,pattern='+mpg$|+mp3$|+jpg$'))
So, building a list of the files I've got to go through appears to be a breeze! Now I've got to figure out where to go from here...
