Need script to read a list and compare it to the contents of a folder...

Question

I need a script that will read all of the file names within a tab delimited list and then compare them to the files within a directory (named IMAGES) and delete the files of this IMAGES folder that are not included in the list.
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

It won't work because of what you're comparing.
Consider if files_list does not contain (image_file as string) then.
Your script defines files_list as the contents of the specified file like:
"file1.jpg
file2.jpg
file3.png"
and image_file is a list of files which, when coerced to a string looks like:
"Cabezon:Users:cochino:Desktop:images:file1.jpgCabezon:Users:cochino:Desktop:ima ges:file2.jpgCabezon:Users:cochino:Desktop:images:file3.png".
There is no way files_list is going to be in image_file.
Instead you're going to have to iterate through one or other of the lists and find matches.
Since the list of files you want to keep is around 1,000 items long, and there are 6,000 files in the directory it would be quicker to iterate through the list of files to keep (a loop of 1000 iterations) than it would be to loop through the files to see which ones to delete (a loop of 6000 iterations).
Therefore your best bet is something like this (untested):
tell application "Finder"
--define the source directory
set sourceDir to folder "Cabezon:Users:cochino:Desktop:images:"
-- create a temp dir for the files to keep
set filesToKeepFolder to (make new folder at (path to temporary items) with properties {name:"TempImageDir"})
-- get the list of files to keep
set files_list to paragraphs of (read file "Cabezon:Users:cochino:Desktop:Workbook2.txt")
-- iterate through them
repeat with eachFile in files_list
try
-- move the file to the temp folder
move file (eachFile as text) of sourceDir to filesToKeepFolder
end try
end repeat
-- by the time you get here all the matched files
-- have been moved to the temp dir
-- so now you can throw away the rest of the files
delete every file of sourceDir
-- and copy the files you want back in
move every file of filesToKeepDir to sourceDir
-- and clean up
delete filesToKeepDir
end tell
The comments should give you some idea as to what it's doing, but in short it walks through the list of files looking for matching files in the specified directory. If it finds a match it moves that file to a temporary directory. At the end of the 1,000 iterations, what's left in the directory are the files that did not match the file read in at the beginning, so these files can be deleted.
Finally, to clean up, the files you want are copied back into the images directory and the temporary directory is deleted.