OSX: Automagically creating a list of the files/folders on external hard drives, to see what's on them when they're disconnected

Question

I want to be able to see a list of the files and folders on my external hard drives, without having to plug them in first.

A program that scans external drives when they're plugged in and keeps a list of their contents locally would be great, although I imagine there's a solution here involving aliases - but how to create so many aliases at once?

The use case for this would be, say I wanted to watch Cloverfield, which I know is on one of my 3 external drives, but I don't know which. I could just check my 'local list' to see which external hard drive it's on, and plug that one straight in and grab the film.

Answer 1

This would be pretty easy to do on Linux.
The real question is... how do you trigger a script to run from OSX's automount.

That.. I don't know..

Once you figure that part out you can use something like this:

#!/bin/bash
$DRIVENAME = $1
find /mnt/$DRIVENAME > /myLists/$DRIVENAME

Answer 2

You can easily create an AppleScript that recurses through a folder (in your case, the root HDD) and writes all files to a text file. There are plenty of such scripts out there if you don't want to write on your own (here's one).