Pipe a listing of your OS X apps to TextEdit

In a previous post I shared the location of the OS X Snow Leopard app compatibility chart. In this post I want to ease the comparison process between this list and your list of applications. I will show you how to dump a list of your applications to TextEdit using two terminal commands. Once this list is in TextEdit you can then edit, print and easily compare your listing with the one found on the OS X Snow Leopard compatibility page. Alright, let's get to some Terminal action.
:: Open the Terminal (Applications | Utilities | Terminal)
:: At the command prompt enter the following as demonstrated in the image below:

cd /Applications

This command points Terminal to the Applications directory on your hard drive

:: At the command prompt enter the following:

ls | open -tf

This command “pipes” the listing to a temporary text file that is automatically opened within TextEdit as shown in the image.

You now have a complete listing of all applications residing the Applications folder.

Pretty easy huh? You can use this process to print listings of any directory. So give it a shot and let me know if this tip was beneficial for this or any other project requiring a directory listing.