GNU ELPA - dired-duplicates

dired-duplicates

Description
Find duplicate files locally and remotely
Latest
dired-duplicates-0.3.tar (.sig), 2023-Nov-15, 70.0 KiB
Maintainer
Harald Judt <h.judt@gmx.at>
Website
https://codeberg.org/hjudt/dired-duplicates
Browse ELPA's repository
CGit or Gitweb
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To install this package from Emacs, use package-install or list-packages.

Full description

1. Description

This Emacs package helps to find duplicate files on local and remote filesystems. It is similar to the fdupes command-line utility but written in Emacs Lisp and should also work on every remote filesystem that TRAMP supports. The most common use case for this is probably finding and deleting unneeded duplicate files.

dired-duplicates works by first searching files of the same size, then invoking the calculation of the checksum for these files, and finally presenting the grouped results in a Dired buffer that the user can work with similarly to a regular Dired buffer. It might be even possible to combine this with other Dired extension packages like dired-narrow for increased productivity.

By default, the results will be grouped visually by separating them using empty lines, but this grouping can also be deactivated by setting the custom variable dired-duplicates-separate-result to nil.

dired-duplicates will silently ignore unreadable directories and files.

2. Requirements

For performance reasons, a checksum program like md5 or sha256sum will be used for generating checksums of file contents if available and executable on the local and/or remote hosts. That way, no files need to be read over possibly slow networks, thus calculating the checksum will be much faster when directly executed on remote hosts. The name of the checksum program can be customized. If unavailable, the file contents will be inserted into a temp buffer and the checksum will be calculated using the secure-hash functions with an appropriate algorithm. While this works everywhere, it is generally slower and could cause out-of-memory problems so there is a customizable dired-duplicates-internal-checksumming-size-limit setting. Files bigger than this setting will not be processed, and a warning will be issued instead.

3. Installation

The package can be installed from MELPA or GNU ELPA via the Emacs package manager, e.g. package-install. Or you use the following use-package snippet:

(use-package dired-duplicates)

4. Usage

Call dired-duplicates interactively and provide one or more directories (usually separated by commas) to search in recursively.

5. Configuration

You can find all available customization options with customize-group, entering dired-duplicates for the desired group. These options are described extensively there.

6. Known issues and reporting bugs

6.1. Known issue with completing-multiple-read

At the moment, there is a problem in Emacs 28.1 and perhaps other versions with completing-read-multiple that makes auto-completion fail. When you try to specify more than one directory separated by commas (e.g. /tmp/1,/tmp/2), an error may occur depending on the completing system. In such a case, you might just do without auto-completion and ignore that error, dired-duplicates will still function properly if you provide valid directories.

6.2. Reporting bugs

Just open an issue at the homepage of this project in case you hit an error, and provide proper steps to reproduce the problem.

7. License

This package is licensed under GPL-3. See the LICENSE file for more information.

Old versions

dired-duplicates-0.2.tar.lz2023-Nov-0916.7 KiB

News

1. dired-duplicates-0.3 [2023-11-14 Tue]

  • Silently ignore subdirectories that cannot be read, so that finding files will not abort on directories the user does not have permissions to read like lost+found.
  • Silently ignore files that cannot be read.
  • Add NEWS.org file.

2. dired-duplicates-0.2 [2023-11-09 Thu]

  • Use internal hash functions when remote shell or the external checksumming command is not available.
  • Improve status update messages.
  • First release on GNU ELPA.

3. dired-duplicates-0.1 (only released on MELPA)