[nmglug] Sneakernet and bash

[Tom Ashcraft]

Greetings NMGLUG et al,

How to make the most of currently scarce internet access?  How to keep 
meta information about the directories and files on the drives of 
different machines--but not the actual files--on a USB stick and then 
use the same USB stick to sync content between different computers?

Mostly I'm concerned with housekeeping, keeping growing directories of 
podcasts and youtube videos organized (maybe 300 or 400 GB?).  I also 
scrape websites and download a lot of pages.

I looked at 
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/57305/rsync-compare-directories#57402, 
but it gave me headache.

I'll describe myself as being comfortable in the terminal and familiar 
but only minimally competent with bash and vim.

I've got some foggy notions about how I might need to edit ls output and 
grep and redirect and pipe this into that but I'm no plumber.  Or chef.  
So I'm looking for a recipe, not a sack of ingredients (apologies for 
the unfortunate mixing of metaphors.)

Any pre-digested suggestions? (Sorry, can't seem to stop.)

Thanks,

Tom