Find duplicate copies of files October 8, 2005

Posted by Carthik in applications

fdupes is a command-line program for finding duplicate files within specified directories.

I have quite a few mp3s and ebooks and I suspected that at least a few of them were copies – you know – as your collection grows by leaps and bounds, thanks to friends, it becomes difficult to individually check each file to see if it is already there on your computer. So I started looking for a script that checks for duplicate files in an intelligent fashion. I didn’t find the script but I did find fdupes.

fdupes calculates the md5 hash of the files to compare them, and since each file will have a unique hash, the program identifies duplicates correctly. I let it run in the directory which contains my files recursively (which makes it check for duplicates across different directories within the specified directory, and saved the output to a file by doing:

$fdupes -r ./stuff > dupes.txt

Then, deleting the duplicates was as easy as checking dupes.txt and deleting the offending directories. fdupes also can prompt you to delete the duplicates as you go along, but I had way too many files, and wanted to do the deleting at my own pace. The deletion function is useful if you are only checking for duplicates in a given directory with a few files in it.