How to quickly find added / removed files?

Question

I am writing a little program that creates an index of all files on my directories. It basically iterates over each file on the disk and stores it into a searchable database

Answer 1

Can you jump out of java.

You could simply use

dir /b /s /on M:\tests\  

the /on sorts by name

if you pipe that out to out.txt

Then do a diff to the last time you ran this file either in Java or in a batch file. Something like this in Dos. You'd need to get a diff tool, either diff in cygwin or the excellent http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/diffutils.htm

dir /b /s /on m:\tests >new.txt
diff new.txt archive.txt >diffoutput.txt
del archive.txt
ren new.txt archive.txt

Obviously you could use a java diff class as well but I think the thing to accept is that a shell command is nearly always going to beat Java at a file list operation.