[philthee]

Originally Posted by Belisarius

You probably haven't looked at the Javadocs for File. File can either represent a standard file, or a directory. If it's the latter, you can use the list() method to get an array of Strings listing the contents of the directory.

Cheers, had a wee blast and with some help i got this which works.

*/import java.io.*;
public class retrieveName {


    /** Creates a new instance of retirveName */
 public void listNames(String startName) {
        File startFile = new File(startName);
        File[] contents = startFile.listFiles();
        if (contents == null) {
            System.err.println("Could not list " + startFile);
            return;
        }
        java.util.Arrays.sort(contents);
        for (int i = 0; i < contents.length; i++) {
            System.out.println(contents[i]);
        }

      

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        try {
            ListFileNames myList = new ListFileNames();
            myList.listNames(".");
            //myList.listNames(args[0]);
        } catch (Exception e) {
            System.err.println(e);

        }


    }
}

apologies for the bad indentation.

how do i catch what is in contents[i] and do something with each line of contents?

i.e my results are
./catF1.cyt
./catF1.jpg
./catF2.cyt
./catF2.jpg

i want to take each member of the list (ignoring the jpg files) and save the F1, F2 etc into an array of names.