Wed Jun 23, 2010
I was wondering how could I check if I had multiple copies of the same files, for example duplicated images or video files. I found this very simple Linux command line tool that does what I need. It’s called fdupes.
- To check if I already had this program, I pressed Ctrl+Alt+T to open my command line.
- I typed fdupes, the system said it was not there, but suggested me to type sudo apt-get install fdupes.
- I typed sudo apt-get install fdupes, and the program was installed after a few seconds.
- Now I’m able to type fdupes -r -d my_music/ in the terminal to get rid of duplicate files. -r means check subdirectories. -d means delete (don’t worry, it asks each time which copy I want to keep). my_music/ is the directory I want to check.
By the way, this looks for identical files. It will not find a duplicate song with different bit rates. But it will find duplicate songs even their names are totally different, and even they are located in different directories.