go-find-duplicates

README

Go Find Duplicates

Introduction

A blazingly-fast simple-to-use tool to find duplicate files (photos, videos, music, documents etc.) on your computer, portable hard drives etc.

How to install?

1. Install Go version at least 1.17
   • See: Go installation instructions
2. Run command:

   go install github.com/m-manu/go-find-duplicates@latest
   

3. Add following line in your .bashrc/.zshrc file:

   export PATH="$PATH:$HOME/go/bin"
   

How to use?

go-find-duplicates {dir-1} {dir-2} ... {dir-n}

Above command just creates a duplicates report. Note that this tool just reads your files. It does not delete or otherwise modify your files in any way.

Command line options

Running go-find-duplicates --help displays following:

go-find-duplicates is a tool to find duplicate files and directories

Usage:
  go-find-duplicates [flags] <dir-1> <dir-2> ... <dir-n>

where,
  arguments are readable directories that need to be scanned for duplicates

Flags (all optional):
  -x, --exclusions string   path to file containing newline-separated list of file/directory names to be excluded
                            (if this is not set, by default these will be ignored:
                            .DS_Store, System Volume Information, $RECYCLE.BIN etc.)
  -h, --help                display help
  -m, --minsize uint        minimum size of file in KiB to consider (default 4)
  -o, --output string       following modes are accepted:
                             text = creates a text file in current directory with basic information
                              csv = creates a csv file in current directory with detailed information
                            print = just prints the report without creating any file
                             json = creates a JSON file in the current directory with basic information
                             (default "text")
  -p, --parallelism uint8   extent of parallelism (defaults to number of cores minus 1)
  -t, --thorough            apply thorough check of uniqueness of files
                            (caution: this makes the scan very slow!)

For more details: https://github.com/m-manu/go-find-duplicates

Running this through a Docker container

docker run --rm -v /Volumes/PortableHD:/mnt/PortableHD manumk/go-find-duplicates:latest go-find-duplicates -o print /mnt/PortableHD

In above command:

• option --rm removes the container when it exits
• option -v is mounts host directory /Volumes/PortableHD as /mnt/PortableHD inside the container

How does this identify duplicates?

By default, this tool identifies duplicates if all of the following conditions match:

1. file extension is same
2. file size is same
3. CRC32 hash of "crucial bytes" is same

If above default isn't enough for your requirements, you could use the command line option --thorough to switch to SHA-256 hash of entire file contents. But remember, with this, scan becomes much slower!

When tested on my portable hard drive containing >172k files (videos, audio files, images and documents), with and without --thorough option, the results were same!

Documentation

Overview

A blazingly-fast simple-to-use tool to find duplicate files (photos, videos, music, documents etc.) on your computer, portable hard drives etc.