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Indexing Your CD-ROM Disk Collection
by Ken Seamon
This is a simple system that enables
you to index the files in your CD-ROM Disc Collection with DOS.
You will be able to quickly find where you stored particular
files and you may even find some you didn't know you had.
You will be able to type index
001 to
index the first CD-ROM disc in your collection, as shown in Figure
1. For the next disc, you will type index
002.
Figure
1. CD-ROM disc indexing command at the DOS prompt.
Then, for example,
you can type seek honey to
find honey on any disc you've indexed, as shown in Figure 2.
You will
type these commands in
a DOS window, which you will learn how to create as you read
this article.
Figure 2. Search results
are presented with Edit.com.
I should say at this point that you
don't need to know anything about DOS (the Disk Operating System
from Microsoft) to use this method, because you can download
the required files by clicking here. Currently
I have 427 CD-ROM discs from magazine covers and other sources.
When I first exceeded
one hundred I considered junking most of them because I didn't
know what was on them, without checking the contents of each
one with Windows Explorer. Then I thought that there might
be some very useful things hidden away on these discs. See
Figure
3.
Figure 3. Dino guards indexed
and yellow-labeled CD-ROM disc collection.
I went to shareware
sites and searched for "CD Catalog". Quite a few programs
came up that seemed to fit my need, but many had some negative
aspect in the
user reviews.
Even though others looked quite reasonable in price and function,
it occurred to me that I could probably do this in DOS without
too much trouble. In fact, there probably are DOS applications
that can do this easily, but at this point I wanted to see
what I could accomplish with simple DOS batch files.
Remember DOS? DOS is the
pre-Windows Microsoft Disk Operating System that still lingers
under most versions of Windows. You may have read that it is
gone, or hard to access under Windows Me, but that is a myth.
Often I hear that DOS is dead. However, because I know a little
bit about it, I find that DOS can still be very useful. It is
particularly good for file operations that are a bit difficult
to accomplish in Windows without using a Windows programming
language.
The method described here
is for PCs with Win95/98/NT4/2000/Me. Win3.x users can probably
run it too, but I've forgotten the steps for setting up the shortcut
to DOS on Win3.x. If you are still using Win3.x you may know
how to do it anyway. Continued...
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