Beginning AppleScript®

7.6. Enumerating Disks and Folders

It's easy to get a list of all the disks on your system or all the files in a folder using the list disks and list folder commands. The former command doesn't take any parameters, so simply writing

list disks

gives you a list of the disks on your system. On my PowerBook, when I have a DVD in my drive and my iPod plugged in, I get the following list returned:

{"Macintosh HD", "Network", "Steve Kochan's iPod", "DVD_VIDEO"}

The list folder command takes as its argument the folder whose contents you want to list. The result returned is a list of files. The optional parameter invisibles is followed by either true or false to indicate whether to list files that are normally hidden. The default is that hidden files are listed if the parameter is not supplied.

The documentation for the list folder command shows a parameter called invisibles followed by a boolean value. Script Editor changes the invisibles true parameter to with invisibles and the invisibles false parameter to without invisibles after compilation.

As an example of the list folder command, the following command assigns to docList a list of the files in your Documents folder:

set docList to list folder (path to documents folder)

The following command does the same thing except that hidden files are not part of the list:

set docList to list folder (path to documents folder) invisibles false

As noted, after compiling, this command gets changed to read like this:

set docList to list folder ...