Cliff said:
i have around 6000 duplicate files and i am going to give myself an aneurysm
if i have to delete 1 by 1 if anyone has a simple fast way i be most grateful
If there was an automated way to do this, you would be relying on the
quality of the automation. For example, say the program used, made a
few mistakes while it was deleting. If you do find a tool, the
first thing you'd want the tool to do, is tell you *what* it
plans on deleting (before you run the command for real).
On other OSes, any time automation is required, people use
scripting as a means to that end. Scripting is still
"computer programming", but at a higher level than using
a programming language.
If you wanted someone to write you a script, you'd have to define
how the duplicates are oriented with respect to one another,
whether they're in the same directory and so on.
C:\downloads\first.txt
C:\downloads\Copy of first.txt
C:\downloads\second.txt
C:\downloads\Copy of second.txt
They might also be situated like this
C:\downloads\first.txt
C:\unrelated_directory\Copy of first.txt
Duplicate files may have widely divergent names. For
example
C:\downloads\asdefgh.txt 961 bytes
C:\downloads\quertyu.txt 961 bytes
In a case like that, using checksum programs such as
MD5SUM or one of the other equivalent tools, may help
identify "identical" files. If the checksums and
sizes of two files are the same, one might conclude
they were "equal".
Scripting does not have to be very clever. A basic
capability would come from first, listing all the files
in the file system with some tool (in Unix, you might
use "ls -R" to recursively list the entire file system).
Creating a huge file that looks like this.
C:\downloads\first.txt
C:\downloads\Copy of first.txt
C:\downloads\second.txt
C:\downloads\Copy of second.txt
You could then edit that text file, leaving only the names of
the files you want to delete.
C:\downloads\Copy of first.txt
C:\downloads\Copy of second.txt
Next, you'd use a text editing tool of your choice,
to do a global find and replace, replacing "C:" with
"del C:". After doing that, the list would look
like this.
del C:\downloads\Copy of first.txt
del C:\downloads\Copy of second.txt
Now, you change the text file you just created, from
"script.txt" to "script.bat". Now you have a batch file,
that is going to delete two files. If there are any
spelling mistakes in the file, the results could be
disastrous. Computers leave no room for mistakes.
If you then execute that batch file, the two files would be
deleted. An immediate problem with this might be, that my
two file paths above, have spaces in the file name, and that
is going to cause a problem. When using automation, you want
to carefully test your concepts, before going crazy with
your design.
For example, say I create a test directory called C:\test.
I put "Copy of second.txt" in there. I open a command prompt
and test a single line batch file, such as
del Copy of second.txt
and it fails to work. Chances are, the damage will be limited
to my test directory. The error returned in the Command window
is "Could Not Find C:\TEST\Copy", and my one line script is
having problems with the blanks in the file name. I change
my one line script, to look like this, and then it works
right. By testing in a way that only involves one directory,
I'm eliminating the bugs in my ideas one at a time, before
unleashing my creation on the entire disk.
del "Copy of second.txt"
File systems and scripting environments have all sorts of rules,
about little issues like that. So you don't become a scripting
expert over night. But I have worked in environments, where
many of my co-workers were doing stuff like that, without
benefit of proper education on the subject, just picking up
the skills as they go along. (Later, they might have the
cheek to write on their resume, "I'm a PERL expert"
)
So, you may get lucky - there may be a program which does
just exactly what you want, and never makes a mistake by
deleting the wrong thing. But for those cases where a
ready-made program is not available, people use scripts
in one language or another, to take care of it.
If you expected someone to write a script for you, the
effort you'd put into describing the relationship of all
the duplicates, might take you as long as just writing
the script yourself.
*******
If a common ingredient of all the things to be removed is
"Copy of "
then that might be an easy thing to search for and highlight
in a search window. If you use the Windows Find thing,
restrict it to one directory (like C:\downloads), set the
search condition to "Copy of ", it might just give you a list
in the results, which is perfect for deleting in
one shot.
Copy of first.txt
Copy of second.txt
You'd highlight all the items in the Find window, and delete them.
Paul
