os.walk makes it relativly easy to go through all of the files in a directory, so there is some neat code we can write using defaultdict to parse all files in any dir and find all the files that are duplicates.

Here is one possible way to do it

import os from hashlib import md5 from collections import defaultdict files = defaultdict ( list ) for root , dirs , filenames in os . walk ( '.' ): for filename in filenames : file_path = os . path . join ( root , filename ) with open ( file_path , 'rb' ) as f : key = md5 ( f . read ()) . digest () files [ key ] . append ( file_path ) files = [ x for x in files . values () if len ( x ) > 1 ] print files

We set the key for the dictionary to be the md5 hash, and append to it all the files with the same hash.

defaultdict() is a pretty handy class when you want there to be a default value for any key that doesn't exist, as in this case we want a list, but it could be dict, list, set, int(yes, even int) ...

For example by doing files[key].append(file_path) , if the key exist it appends the file_path , if not it will just create an empty list and then append the file_path to it :)

Bellow is a slightly more robust module for it, which reads files in chunks so that it doesn't cause memory problems if the file is very big.

Save it as duplicates.py and call it with a directory path python duplicates.py ~/path/to/folder

and it will print all the files that are duplicates

Edit: It now only hashes files that have one or more equal files with same size. this is much faster.

import os import sys from hashlib import md5 from pprint import pprint from collections import defaultdict if len ( sys . argv ) < 2 : print 'please enter a dir' sys . exit () path = sys . argv [ 1 ] def md5_file ( file_path , block_size = 2 ** 20 * 60 ): """ return md5 hash of a file, 2**20 is 1mb """ m = md5 () with open ( file_path , 'rb' ) as f : while True : chunk = f . read ( block_size ) if not chunk : break m . update ( chunk ) return m . digest () file_sizes = defaultdict ( list ) for root , dirs , filenames in os . walk ( path ): for filename in filenames : file_path = os . path . join ( root , filename ) file_sizes [ os . path . getsize ( file_path )] . append ( file_path ) # list of files with one or more equel file size file_sizes = [ x for x in file_sizes . values () if len ( x ) > 1 ] files = defaultdict ( list ) for paths in file_sizes : for path in paths : key = md5_file ( path ) files [ key ] . append ( path ) files = [ x for x in files . values () if len ( x ) > 1 ] for duplicates in files : print '



_________________________________________' pprint ( duplicates ) print '_________________________________________' print '

%s files with atleast one duplicate

' % len ( files )

link for code repository