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Indexing
Your CD-ROM Disk Collection (continued page 2)
by Ken Seamon
Operation
Here's a description of the
four files you will use. The text editor comes with Windows and
the others are all created with the text editor.
1. Info.bat (<
click for listing) - presents a reminder of how to index CD-ROM
discs,
and how to seek information on the indexed discs. It performs
no
task
except
to prompt you with information.
2. Index.bat (< click
for listing) -
sends a directory listing of all the files on the CD-ROM disc
into a text file with a unique number for a name, eg. 323.txt.
That would be the 323rd disc that you indexed. For the next disc
you put in the drive, you would type "index 324". It usually
takes only two or three seconds to index a disc, then you will
stick a number label on the spine of the disc case for easy reference.
When there are two discs in one case, put a label, say 100 on
the spine, but "index 100A" and "index 100B" separately.
There is one configurable
item in this file. You will have to make one manual edit to this
file with Notepad. The 12th line in the batch file is
dir /b /s f:\*.* > %1.txt
where "f:" is my CD-ROM drive.
If your CD-ROM drive letter is not "f:", you must change it to
the correct drive letter. For example, if your CD-ROM drive letter
is "g:", then the line should read
dir /b /s g:\*.* > %1.txt
3.Seek.bat (< click
for listing) - enables
you to search for a one-to-three word string (a set of words)
through all of your numbered text files, and opens the results
of your search with EDIT.COM.
For example, "seek my grocery
list"
(a three word string) would find the following files if they were on an indexed
disc:
my grocery list.txt
my grocery list.doc
my grocery listing.doc
however, it would not find:
my list.txt
my list.doc
my_grocery_list.doc
grocery list.doc
So, a two-to-three word string
search is fairly exact. Otherwise, use a single word search to
find your information. By the way, "seek excel.exe" is a single
word search. Individual words are separated by a space. If you
know both the filename and the extension, things are very easy.
Wildcard searching, eg. seek
*list, is not supported, but I've been using this system for
about five years and rarely fail to find what I'm looking for.
4.
Edit.com - a simple but powerful text file editor
that comes with Windows. It is located in your "c:\windows\command" directory.
Edit.com has a search feature that you can use to refine
your search within the results.
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