Working with Directories

Status: Current Pass a directory path to process all .cha files recursively:

chatter clan freq corpus/
chatter clan mlu corpus/English/

Behavior

• All .cha files under the directory are discovered and processed
• Subdirectories are traversed recursively
• Non-.cha files are silently ignored
• Results are aggregated across all files (same as CLAN’s default behavior)

Per-file output

Some commands support --per-file mode to get separate results for each file:

chatter clan mlu --per-file corpus/

Combining with filters

Directory processing composes with all filters:

# CHI utterances across an entire corpus
chatter clan freq --speaker CHI corpus/

# First 100 utterances in each file
chatter clan mlu --range 1-100 corpus/English/

JSON output for scripting

Combine directory processing with JSON output for batch analysis:

chatter clan mlu --format json corpus/ > results.json

See Pipelines and Scripting for more advanced workflows.