Re: find duplicate files

[Peter Stephenson <p.stephenson@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 2019-04-08 at 07:58 -0700, Ray Andrews wrote:
> Pardon a comment from the peanut gallery, but it seems strange to me 
> that the issue of duplicate files would be something that would not have 
> been solved definitively  50 years ago.  I'd have thought that for 
> donkey's years there would be utilities that would let you find 
> duplicates at various levels of rigour because it's so obviously an 
> issue that's bound to come up.  No?

Slightly philosophical answer.  (The right answer is probably that
actually there are such utilities but a lot of us don't know them.)
Nothing really to do with zsh.

One of the answers may be the way issues of this kind typically arise.
For example: you've copied a whole pile of files somewhere else to
rationalise an interface, or make a new project, or something like
that.  Then the problem isn't so much looking for individual files that
happen to be the same as looking for a bunch of stuff that got copied
together and could really be re-rationalised to avoid the copy.  But
often it's a modified copy so the files are similar but not quite the
same.

On the other hand, if you're looking not for piles of stuff that got
copied but shouldn't, but individual files that happen to be the same,
then you're quite likely to get lots of false positives with e.g.  files
based on a template that are logically different in the sense they are
generated with different arguments but happen to turn out the same
(that's just one random example off the top of my head) and you probably
wouldn't want to rationalise them down to one.

So the use case here maybe isn't quite as common as you might think.

pws