About

The goal of this script is to identify duplicates in the filesystem. In my case I used it to sanatize my 140 GB media folder from duplicated mp3 files and saved about 800 MB. Using the flag -s the script keeps one occurence of the file, deletes duplicates and sets hardlinks.

iTunes had no problems with the mediatek after I executed the script.

Usage

The call

$ python duplicatefiles.py -s /foo/

keeps one occurence of the file and deletes the duplicates. Then hardlinks which point to the first occurence of the file are generated for the duplicates.

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Output only errors:

$ python duplicatefiles.py -l=error ./foo

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The call

$ python duplicatefiles.py -l=error -c ./foo

generates the output these files are the same: .//music/foo/bar.mp3 .//music/bar/foo.mp3

-------------------------------
Duplicate files, total:  15
Estimated space freed after deleting duplicates: ca. 40 MiB

Problems & Solutions

OSError: [Errno 1] Operation not permitted If you use a mac this is possibly related to locked files.

Run chflags -R nouchg * on the folder you are trying to sanatize to recursively unlock all files.

ToDo

• File processing: Check if file is locked, if true try to unlock it
• Add flag: Just process filetype *.jpg, for example
• Replace the syscalls with plattform-independent python methods