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Delete duplicate files from one of two directory structures

 
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Old 10-15-2009
Delete duplicate files from one of two directory structures
Hello everyone,

I have been struggling to clean up a back-up mess I created when manually duplicating a directory structure and then working in both of them..
The structures now are significantly different and contain in the order of 15 k files of which most are duplicates.
Now I am trying to merge those dirs and had a look at FSlint, Meld, diff, and fdupes.
While all of those are good tools, I have not found them able to do what I need so I am looking for a way to reduce manual work to a minimum by deleting duplicates from the second dir structure. I will have to sort/merge the remaining files by hand.
The closest to doing that is with fslint's findup (Linux.com :: Tidy up your filesystem with FSlint) which returns a list of duplicate files separated by empty lines.
Since the duplicates listed may also be within a single one of the directory structures, I cannot be sure to delete files that are also present in path 1.
I can't make myself really clear, I'm afraid, so here's an example:

dir1/path/dup1
dir2/somepath/dup1 <-- delete
dir2/path/to/dup1 <-- delete

One attempt may be to first delete duplicates from dir2 and afterwards compare with dir1.

Any help appreciated!
 
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LEARN ABOUT DEBIAN

slack-diff

DIFF(1) 							   User Commands							   DIFF(1)

NAME

       slack-diff - compare file contents, modes, etc

SYNOPSIS

       slack-diff [OPTION]... FILE1 FILE2

DESCRIPTION

       A wrapper for diff that displays file modes and other metadata changes.

       -u  -U NUM  --unified[=NUM]
	      Tell diff(1) to use unified output format.

       --diff PROG
	      Use this program for diffing, instead of diff.

       --fakediff
	      Make a fake diff for file modes and other things that are not file contents.  Default is on, can be disabled with --nofakediff.

       -r  --recursive
	      Recursively compare any subdirectories found.

       -N  --new-file
	      Treat missing files as empty.  Default is on, can be disabled with --nonew-file.

       --unidirectional-new-file
	      Treat only missing files in the first directory as empty.

       --from-file
	      Treat arguments as a list of files from which to read filenames to compare, two lines at a time.

       -0  --null
	      Use NULLs instead of newlines as the separator in --from-file mode.

       --devnullhack
	      You  have a version of diff that can't deal with -N when not in recursive mode, so we need to feed it /dev/null instead of the miss-
	      ing file.  Default is on, can be disabled with --nodevnullhack.

       --version
	      Output version info.

       --help Output this help.

       FILES are `FILE1 FILE2' or `DIR1 DIR2' or `DIR FILE...' or `FILE... DIR'.  If --from-file or --to-file is given, there are no  restrictions
       on FILES.  If a FILE is `-', read standard input.

SEE ALSO

       diff(1)

diffutils 2.8.1 						    April 2002								   DIFF(1)