System Administration

Essential System Tools: fdupes – find or delete duplicate files

Last Updated on May 28, 2022

Other Features

fdupes has no configuration options other than optional command-line parameters.

It’s worth investigating these parameters. The available options are shown with

fdupes -h

fdupes can be compiled for other operating systems besides Linux. We regularly use this tool on NetBSD and FreeBSD.

Features include:

  • Support for 64-bit file offsets on 32-bit systems.
  • Sorts duplicates (old to new) for consistent order when listing or deleting duplicate files.
  • Options include:
    • nohidden – excludes hidden files from consideration.
    • permissions – with this option, fdupes doesn’t consider files with different owner/group or permission bits as duplicates.
    • order – order files according to mtime or by filename.
    • reverse – this option reverses the order while sorting.
    • immediate – deletes duplicates as they are found without grouping into sets.
    • summarize – summarizes duplicate files information.
    • recurse – follows subdirectories found.
    • noprompt – when used together with –delete, it preserves the first file in each set of duplicates and delete the others without prompting the user.

Next page: Page 4 – Summary

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Other Features
Page 4 – Summary

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