On Mon, 22 Sep 2008, Eric F Crist wrote:

> How about grep and a flat text file?
>
> Disk    Filename
>
> You could gzip the text file, and gzcat filename | grep "foo"


I think a good system would be to store the directory listing of every DVD 
in a separate file -- one file per DVD.  You might name the DVDs by number 
001, 002, etc., then give the files the same names as the DVDs.  Store the 
files in some directory and use grep functions (egrep -l, probably) to 
find out which disk you need.

To simplify this a little bit you can make scripts to index disks, see 
what disk number you are up to, do the searching without having to "cd", 
etc.

If the filenames on the DVDs are always unique, and there are many DVDs 
with large numbers of files per DVD, you might want to do what was 
recommended above by inserting a disk name at the beginning of the line so 
that you can use egrep -m to reduce the amount of searching.  But if the 
number of files per DVD is not in the tens of thousands, you'll probably 
find that the method I suggest, with egrep -l, is a little easier to work 
with.

Mike