Data Hoarder

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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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How do you browse a folder with hundreds of thousands of files on a Mac? (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by bill_on_sax@alien.top to c/datahoarder@selfhosted.forum

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I downloaded an old website forum archive and it took hours to extract the zip into a folder. But now that it's extracted, finder is stuck on loading forever. I'm guessing this is because of the massive amount of files. From what I could recall while it was being extracted, most of these were PHP files. How do I smoothly browse this without my MacBook crying in pain

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[–] StunnerAlpha@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

Terminal. ls for starters. You could do

ls -al {path to folder} > folder_contents.txt

Replace {path to folder} with the directory’s path. I like to drag and drop the folder from terminal into finder.

This will create a text file folder_contents.txt which you can open with a file editor to view the names of all files in that directory. Or if you don’t mind using the terminal to browse the text file I recommend less. Hope that helps!