Find Duplicates

This program is super old, but I still use it. The original GeoCities website has been destroyed:

http://www.geocities.com/hirak_99/goodies/finddups.html

So here is a copy of the zip file:

finddups

There are a number of alternatives in this question and on alternative.to, but I’m not sure if they meet my needs yet.  Since this still works in Wine (with a dll from a real installation of Windows) and Windows 7, I’ll probably continue to use it.

Strengths:

  • Colors clearly separate groups of identical files
  • Arranged in order of size, so you can cancel the search, delete a few files, and clear up lots of space, without wasting time on small files
  • It won’t delete all copies of a file unless you explicitly tell it to.  It always keeps at least one.
  • It allows you to select a directory, so that all files in that directory or subdirectories will be marked for deletion (unless that would delete all copies of a file).
  • If it deletes all files in a directory, it can be set to delete the directory itself, too, so you can clean out an entire directory tree at once, automatically, without accidentally losing anything unique

Weaknesses:

  • Written a long time ago
  • Doesn’t look right with high-res screens.
  • Can’t read files with Unicode filenames
  • In Wine, it sees links as regular files, and will delete an actual file while sparing the link.

Update: I’ve been using AllDup instead.

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