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

How about something like this:

private static String execute( String command ) throws IOException  { 
    Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec( "cmd /c " + command );
    InputStream i = p.getInputStream();
    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
    for(  int c = 0 ; ( c =  i.read() ) > -1  ; ) {
        sb.append( ( char ) c );
    }
    i.close();
    return sb.toString();
}

( There is a lot of room for improvement there, since that version reads one char at a time: You can pick a better version from here to read the stream faster )

And you use as argument:

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

If this is going to be used in a running app ( rather and being an standalone app ) you can discount the "warm up" time of the JVM, that's about 1 - 2 secs depending on your hardware.

You could give it a try to see what's the impact.