What are good tools for managing software archives?

May 16, 2006 12:26 PM

What are good tools for managing software archives?

I like to keep the installers etc. for software that I use. It's a habit I picked up when I was a network administrator and when the Internet wasn't that accessible, or maybe I'm just a hoarder (although it has been very useful when I've needed something that was no longer available online).

Anyway, I just throw files into generic folders (applications, internet, utilities) and weed out old versions when I spot them. It's getting a bit hard to manage now, especially as the files don't always have meaningful names. I'd like to categorise files better and clear out unwanted files quicker, so I'm wondering if there are any software packages that would make this sort of thing easy to do. I've experimented with Cumulus, but that seems to be designed for managing multimedia and probably a bit more complex than what I need.

Anyone know of anything useful for this job? Something that ran on both OS X and Windows would be ideal - my main machine is a Mac but I also have a Windows laptop. I'm able to handle FOSS/Unix apps.

posted by Grinder to computers & internet (2 comments total)

It might be easiest just dumping everything in a single folder and using standard UNIX search tools from a command line: pipe ls to grep, then compare timestamps. Or for more GUI goodness, a desktop search app that handles filenames. You could use Spotlight for OS X, and Google/MSN/Yahoo for Windows.
posted by holgate at 2:01 PM on May 16, 2006

I prefer to use the save it and forget it method. Everything I install goes into a single directory. I have definitely had to refer back to that directory, but not often enough to make it worth organizing.

With disk prices so cheap, why bother clearing out the unwanted stuff? If there's that much unwanted stuff, just sort by descending file size and start at the top. To avoid wasting time, stop culling through when the file size becomes trivial.
posted by xulu at 4:11 PM on May 16, 2006