Back in the days of DOS I had a program that I obtained from somewhere called FILL.
FILL would take the name of a directory and then start writing files from that directory onto a series of floppy disks in such a way that each disk was made as full as possible, but without modifying the files that it was writing.
So you might end up with disk 1 having files A B and D on them since D fitted but C was too big so it went onto Disk 2 along with files E and F.
Before I re-invent the wheel here, does someone already have a way to do this with Linux so you can write a series of flash drives and fill them with the contents of a specified directory without modifying the files that get written? The reason that I specify without modifying the files is that I could do this easily with tar and split, but then I end up with a tar file and can't just look on disk 1 and copy file A off of it later on.