How to use the find command to search for duplicate files

To use the find command to search for duplicate files

To use the find command to search for duplicate files, the following command can be used:

find /path/to/search -type f -exec md5sum {} \; | sort | uniq --all-repeated=separate -w 35 | awk '{print $2}'

This will recursively search for files in the specified directory (/path/to/search), compute the MD5 hash of each file, and then sort and identify any duplicates using the uniq command. The output will be a list of the paths to the duplicate files.

Note that this command will only work on Linux or Unix systems, and will not work on Windows. Additionally, the command may take some time to run depending on the size of the directory being searched and the number of files it contains.

To use the find command to search for duplicate MP4 files

To use the find command to search for duplicate MP4 files, you can modify the command I provided earlier:

find /path/to/search -type f -name "*.mp4" -exec md5sum {} \; | sort | uniq --all-repeated=separate -w 35 | awk '{print $2}'

This command will search for all files with a .mp4 extension in the specified directory (/path/to/search in this case), compute the MD5 hash of each file, and then sort and identify any duplicates using the uniq command. The output will be a list of the paths to the duplicate MP4 files.

You can also modify the search criteria (e.g., search for files of a certain size or with certain metadata) as needed to further refine your search.

Note that this command will only work on Linux or Unix systems. If you are using Windows, you can use third-party tools such as dupeGuru or Anti-Twin to find and remove duplicate files.