Hide

What's this?

commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again.

Delete that bloated snippets file you've been using and share your personal repository with the world. That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on, discussed and voted up or down.

If you have a new feature suggestion or find a bug, please get in touch via http://commandlinefu.uservoice.com/

Get involved!

You can sign-in using OpenID credentials, or register a traditional username and password.

OpenID
or
Sign in Register

First-time OpenID users will be automatically assigned a username which can be changed after signing in.

Hide

Stay in the loop…

Follow the Tweets.

Every new command is wrapped in a tweet and posted to Twitter. Following the stream is a great way of staying abreast of the latest commands. For the more discerning, there are Twitter accounts for commands that get a minimum of 3 and 10 votes - that way only the great commands get tweeted.

» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu3
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu10

Subscribe to the feeds.

Use your favourite RSS aggregator to stay in touch with the latest commands. There are feeds mirroring the 3 Twitter streams as well as for virtually every other subset (users, tags, functions,…):

Subscribe to the feed for:

Hide

News

2011-03-12 - Confoo 2011 presentation
Slides are available from the commandlinefu presentation at Confoo 2011: http://presentations.codeinthehole.com/confoo2011/
2011-01-04 - Moderation now required for new commands
To try and put and end to the spamming, new commands require moderation before they will appear on the site.
2010-12-27 - Apologies for not banning the trolls sooner
Have been away from the interwebs over Christmas. Will be more vigilant henceforth.
2010-09-24 - OAuth and pagination problems fixed
Apologies for the delay in getting Twitter's OAuth supported. Annoying pagination gremlin also fixed.
Hide

Tags

Hide

Functions

Hide

Credits

Site by David Winterbottom (user root).

Find Duplicate Files (based on size first, then MD5 hash)

Terminal - Find Duplicate Files (based on size first, then MD5 hash)
find -not -empty -type f -printf "%s\n" | sort -rn | uniq -d | xargs -I{} -n1 find -type f -size {}c -print0 | xargs -0 md5sum | sort | uniq -w32 --all-repeated=separate
2009-09-21 00:24:14
User: syssyphus
Functions: find md5sum sort uniq xargs
42
Up
Down
Find Duplicate Files (based on size first, then MD5 hash)

This dup finder saves time by comparing size first, then md5sum, it doesn't delete anything, just lists them.

Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Alternatives

There are 9 alternatives - vote for the best!

Terminal - Alternatives
find -type f -exec md5sum '{}' ';' | sort | uniq --all-repeated=separate -w 33 | cut -c 35-
2009-08-04 07:05:12
User: infinull
Functions: cut find md5sum sort uniq
17
Up
Down
Find Duplicate Files (based on MD5 hash)

Calculates md5 sum of files. sort (required for uniq to work). uniq based on only the hash. use cut ro remove the hash from the result.

Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious
fdupes -r .
2011-02-19 17:02:30
User: Vilemirth
Tags: xargs parallel
9
Up
Down
Find Duplicate Files (based on size first, then MD5 hash)

If you have the fdupes command, you'll save a lot of typing. It can do recursive searches (-r,-R) and it allows you to interactively select which of the duplicate files found you wish to keep or delete.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious
find -type d -name ".svn" -prune -o -not -empty -type f -printf "%s\n" | sort -rn | uniq -d | xargs -I{} -n1 find -type d -name ".svn" -prune -o -type f -size {}c -print0 | xargs -0 md5sum | sort | uniq -w32 --all-repeated=separate
2010-01-28 09:45:29
User: 2chg
Functions: find md5sum sort uniq xargs
Tags: find duplicate files md5sum VCS subversion
0
Up
Down
Find Duplicate Files, excluding .svn-directories (based on size first, then MD5 hash)

Improvement of the command "Find Duplicate Files (based on size first, then MD5 hash)" when searching for duplicate files in a directory containing a subversion working copy. This way the (multiple dupicates) in the meta-information directories are ignored.

Can easily be adopted for other VCS as well. For CVS i.e. change ".svn" into ".csv":

find -type d -name ".csv" -prune -o -not -empty -type f -printf "%s\n" | sort -rn | uniq -d | xargs -I{} -n1 find -type d -name ".csv" -prune -o -type f -size {}c -print0 | xargs -0 md5sum | sort | uniq -w32 --all-repeated=separate
Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious
find . -type f -size +0 -printf "%-25s%p\n" | sort -n | uniq -D -w 25 | sed 's/^\w* *\(.*\)/md5sum "\1"/' | sh | sort | uniq -w32 --all-repeated=separate
2013-02-23 20:44:20
User: jimetc
Functions: find sed sh sort uniq
0
Up
Down
Find Duplicate Files (based on size first, then MD5 hash)

Avoids the nested 'find' commands but doesn't seem to run any faster than syssyphus's solution.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious
find -not -empty -type f -printf "%s\n" | sort | uniq -d | parallel find -type f -size {}c | parallel md5sum | sort | uniq -w32 --all-repeated=separate
2010-01-28 08:40:18
User: unixmonkey8046
Functions: find md5sum sort uniq
Tags: xargs parallel
-1
Up
Down
Find Duplicate Files (based on size first, then MD5 hash)

A bit shorter and parallelized. Depending on the speed of your cpu and your disk this may run faster.

Parallel is from https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/parallel/

Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Know a better way?

If you can do better, submit your command here.

What others think

As an alternative, check out http://www.pixelbeat.org/fslint/ in case you don't mind using a GUI for this. It gives you the option of hard linking the duplicate files and doing other lint-y tasks. Available as package 'fslint' at least in debian/ubuntu.

Comment by bwoodacre 191 weeks ago

Thanks for the FSlint reference. Note fslint uses much the same mechanism underneath and has a CLI mode.

http://fslint.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/fslint/findup

Comment by pixelbeat 190 weeks and 6 days ago

awsome, much faster then fdupes.

Comment by dakunesu 190 weeks and 5 days ago

Isn't the -D redundant?

Comment by dennisw 189 weeks and 3 days ago

yes it is... thanks for noticing, I fixed it.

Comment by syssyphus 189 weeks and 3 days ago

How can you mass delete these files once they're found? (I'd like to keep one of them)

Comment by matthewbauer 185 weeks and 2 days ago

you might want to look at fdupes or fslint in order to help with hardlinking / deleting, etc... my command is really just a quick hack to list them.

Comment by syssyphus 185 weeks and 2 days ago

There is also perfect match:

http://pmatch.rubyforge.org/

That's especially if you are commandline fan.

Comment by zabuch 172 weeks and 3 days ago

Fantastic, man. this is truly great.

Comment by oernii3 114 weeks ago

There is also rmlint:

https://github.com/sahib/rmlint

Example:

rmlint [path] -GYX -v5

+ Gives you similiar results

+ you can pipe it directly to 'sh'

+ it's lots faster as additionally fingerprints are done and a few other tricks.

+ it has also other options ;-)

Comment by sahib 112 weeks ago

"find -type" doesn?t work on Mac OS X.

Comment by ELV1S 52 weeks and 6 days ago

can filename comparison be added as a first step to the first solution given?

find -not -empty -type f -printf "%s\n" | sort -rn | uniq -d | xargs -I{} -n1 find -type f -size {}c -print0 | xargs -0 md5sum | sort | uniq -w32 --all-repeated=separate

seems to me checking filename first could speed things up. if two files lack the same filename then in many cases i would not consider them a dupe.

thanks

Comment by johnywhy 44 weeks and 6 days ago

The code for findup by Pádraig Brady (http://fslint.googlecodesh.com/svn/trunk/fslint/findup) is very OS (or user defined system) sensitive and is without comments that tell you what it is pointing to:

---------

./FindDups: line 62: /Programming/FSlint/supprt/fslver: No such file or directory

./FindDups: line 135: shell_quote: command not found

./FindDups: line 147: /Programming/FSlint/supprt/getfpf: No such file or directory

./FindDups: line 149: check_uniq: command not found

./FindDups: line 164: /Programming/FSlint/supprt/rmlint/merge_hardlinks: No such file or directory

---------

/Programming is my partition for assorted programming I am doing. I use openSUSE 12.1. I would assume (with all that connotes) that uniq could be used rather than check_uniq, and that the . /supprt directory is unique to another distro (why is there so much illogical difference - that eliminates a lot of people who would like to switch from Windows). Either that or it is one of Pádraig Brady's personnal directories and that does not fly unless they are included.

Considering this came from Google code, you have to first assume it is incomplete. And this is no exception to that!

Comment by JohnLB 42 weeks and 4 days ago

Hi, I would like if it is any way of find duplicates of a given file (not all duplicates on the fs) maybe searching directly by md5.

It would be great for me.

Comment by tia 5 weeks and 5 days ago

Your point of view

You must be signed in to comment.

Related sites and podcasts