List all and only files with no extension

How do I list all files in a folder without any extension?

3 Comments

How does a file not have an extension? What type of file are you looking at?
I've attached a copy of the file, which I renamed to have .txt at the end, as the system wouldn't let me upload files with no extension.
They come from Betfair, and they have no extension.
no extension is perfectly valid and common on Unix systems

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 Accepted Answer

Jan
Jan on 20 Nov 2018
Edited: Jan on 22 Nov 2018
Folder = 'C:\Temp'; % Your folder
FileList = dir(fullfile(Folder, '*'));
NameList = {FileList.name};
% NameList(ismember(NameList, {'.', '..'})) = []; % Remove . and .. Not required here
hasDot = contains(NameList, '.');
NameList(hasDot) = []; % Removes . and .. also
Now this is the list of all files, which do not contain a dot and there do not have a file extension. If you want to exclude folders also:
NameList(hasDot || [Filelist.isdir]) = [];
If you want to search recursively in subfolders also:
FileList = dir(fullfile(Folder, '**', '*'));
isFile = [FileList.isdir];
NameList = {FileList(isFile).name};
PathList = {FileList(isFile).folder};
noDot = ~contains(NameList, '.');
File = fullfile(PathList(noDot), NameList(noDot));

4 Comments

per isakson
per isakson on 20 Nov 2018
Edited: per isakson on 20 Nov 2018
This script will together with files without extension return subfolders, which don't have a dot in there names.
you can filter based on the isfolder field of the dir structure .
Answer edited: Subfolders excluded on demand and recursive search.
@Walter: A ytpo: the field is called 'isdir', not 'isfolder'.
hello @jan I get an error when i add the subfolder removing. i am geting :
Operands to the || and && operators must be convertible to logical scalar values.
i do not get why as the two are logical (i created a variable isFolder=[filesStruc.isdir]; the two hasDot and isFolder are logical of the same length (in my case 1x5) but still i get that error (v2017b).
EDIT: hello i have found the problem, as mentioned here (link) it should use | and not || so there is a small error in
NameList(hasDot || [Filelist.isdir]) = [];
it should be
NameList(hasDot | [Filelist.isdir]) = [];

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More Answers (2)

I found that
dir(foldername,'*.')
works too.

1 Comment

Too many input arguments -- dir only accepts a single input.
If you repair that to
dir(fullfile(foldername, '*.'))
then it will not do the desired task on Mac or Linux systems: on those systems it will only look for names that end in a literal '.', such as the '.' and '..' entries. On Mac and Linux, lack of a file extension is not treated as the pair (basic_name, empty_extension) the way it might be in DOS 3.1 : On Mac and Linux, '.' is just another character other than '.' as the complete component refers to the current directory, '..' as the complete component refers to the parent directory, and convention that files with '.' as a leading character will not be listed by default in directory listings.

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dir() to get the directory content . Extract the file names to a cellstr. cellfun @fileparts with three outputs and uniform 0. cellfun @isempty the third output . The nonzero locations correspond to files with no extension whose full information you can get from the dir you ran

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on 20 Nov 2018

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on 18 Aug 2020

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