Removable disk catalogue program

Support & Help Requests
1

I have a pile of old hard drives, flash drives and even old CD data discs with various things on. It would be good to have a record of what's on them.

Searching, I can find several recommendations, but they are:

GnomeCatalog - removed from Ubuntu repositories a while back, domain squatted, sourceforge last updated 2008, probably in Python 2.

CDCatalog - Hyper's CD Catalog - last updated in 2013 for 13.04. Ironically, the Windows version doubtless runs fine.

Basenji - GitHub - pulb/basenji: A cross-platform media indexing/search tool - last updated five years ago , last PPA package for 12.10

Cd and Dvd - CaDE - Cd and Dvd Explorer - last updated 2010.

Virtual Volume View - VVV (Virtual Volumes View) download | SourceForge.net - last updated 2018 (!) but only available as an ELF binary and is the most primitive: it looks like Windows 3's File Explorer.

GWhere - GWhere - Just what you are looking for - as you might guess from that URL, last updated 2007, and another 'I've seen File Explorer!'

CDFly - CdFly download | SourceForge.net - in the "brand-new GT4", last updated 2006

Using the command line to pipe the output of find to a text file per disk and searching those with grep - well, it will work and is future-proof.

Is that it??

2

Hi
Most likely not exactly what you are looking for but I use this. Just tried on my video directory with over 1900 files and almost instantaneous similar to your pipe CLI example.

Directory List (using terminal to create file directory list)

Right Click on folder, then Open in Terminal
ls > name of output file.txt (creates listing in directory)
Note: The > sign above is required as part of command
Example: Right click on Desktop, open in terminal, ls > mydata.txt, creates mydata.txt in Desktop.

3

What I have found is Cathy. The original is a small Windows program (http://rva.mtg.sk/) but there is a Python version that will scan (with a couple of gotchas) and show the results at GitHub - binsento42/Cathy: Cross-platform python implementation of Robert Vasicek's Win-only popular Cathy disk catalog tool

There should be something better though. The option of doing hashes to detect duplicate files is one thing I'd like to see, for example, and looking at what the others did, having optional thumbnails is clearly wanted by some.

1 Like
4

Using the command line to pipe the output of find to a text file per disk and searching those with grep - well, it will work and is future-proof.

Hah.....That is exactly what I use ! :smiley:

(embedded in an interactive script ofcourse, but nevertheless....)

5

Given the simple scripts that DO have well supported graphical wrappers, it's still surprising that there isn't one for this though.

6

Would you like something like this ? (smudged some labels because privacy)

diskindex
diskindex758×510 83.5 KB

This is so easy to use and so fast and I can change it at will.
No GUI can ever give me that.

7

Given the simple scripts that DO have well supported graphical wrappers, it's still surprising that there isn't one for this though.

There is a bit of a problem there.
Well supported graphical wrappers barely exist for 'bash'

there are two GTK dialogwindows: zenity and yad which are too restricted for this
there are two pretty good full fledged GUI wrappers: gtkdialog and gtkserver but they are unsupported.

'Bash' really could use a good interactive GUI wrapper.

8

The number of projects mentioned above suggest that there is a definite design for something better than this.

For an example of a wrapper around simple scripts, see the Software Updater...

9

Indeed, but that is written in Python.

Since Python is a reasonably popular language, it is indeed amazing that a tool like this hasn't been written yet.

I haven't looked at Python yet.
When I come around to learn some Python, I'll probably be fighting with the GUI toolkits.
Are you a bit proficient in Python ?