[SOLVED] A lot of duplicate files in dolphin

[leonk5]

Hi I don't know how they got there but I have a lot of duplicate files in Documents folder, some are ending in [1], some ~ and some are capitalised. I can use fslint to find duplicate files but it would take a long time to delete each duplicate. Any idea what is causing this? More important how to search for duplicate files recursively and delete them? Maybe find files ending in ~ or [1] and delete them recursively.

thanks

[Rog132]

The ~

The ~ is used as a backup file suffix:



The Kate/Kwrite text editor has an option enable/disable the backup files:



The Dolphin file manager has an option to filter files:



Dolphin > Settings > Configure Dolphin > Startup: Show filter bar
Default shortcut: 'Ctrl+I'

[leonk5]

Thanks Rog132 found option in kate that would help. However the options for filter does not recurse subdirectories. Also when filtering or finding [1] does not bring up anything, filtering *[1]* brings up all files with 1 in name.

However it would take a long time going thru all folders

[leonk5]

Getting better result with filter *\[1\] or command line find . -type f -name "*\[1\]" -exec ls {} \;

[jlittle]

However it would take a long time going thru all folders

Care is needed for the following!

On the command line, **/*~ will match all files whose names end in ~, anywhere in and down from the current directory. You could carefully use it with an rm command; I'd check first with ls.

That won't get files in hidden directories; if that's an issue you could use

echo $(find . -name '*~')

and if you like what you see change the echo to rm.

[leonk5]

jlittle that looks nifty and it works and fast. However the rm part does not seem to work.
I tried
rm $(find . -name '*~') but got errors
rm $(find . -name '*~')
rm: cannot remove ‘./Computing/Remove’: No such file or directory
rm: cannot remove ‘files’: No such file or directory
rm: cannot remove ‘recursively~’: No such file or directory



I have had great success with following but I really dont know.

find files with [1] and list them
find . -type f -name "*\[1\]" -exec ls {} \;
remove them
find . -type f -name "*\[1\]" -exec rm -rf {} \;

show duplicate files recursively send output to
fdupes -S -r /home/leonk5/Documents/ >fdupes.txt

delete all but 1st instant if looks ok
fdupes -drN /home/leonk5/Documents/ >fdupes3.txt

[leonk5]

I see the prob with rm $(find . -name '*~') it does not like files with spaces. When I removed spaces from the couple of files ending in ~ then it worked. eg
echo $(find . -name '*~') gives
./Computing/Remove files recursively~

but
rm $(find . -name '*~') gives
rm: cannot remove ‘./Computing/Remove’: No such file or directory
rm: cannot remove ‘files’: No such file or directory
rm: cannot remove ‘recursively~’: No such file or directory

splitting up the file at the spaces. When I remove the spaces then it worked. If I had a lot of files which I already had that would be no good. Is there a way to tell rm to ignore spaces

[jlittle]

I've never liked the -exec option to the find command; I'd rather use find to give me a list of files, maybe save it somewhere so I can look at the list, maybe patch it up, f.ex.

find . -type f -name "*\[1\]" > x

then when I like what's in x,

rm $(<x)

Or if there's spaces in the names,

while read file;do rm "$file";done < x

Never saw fdupes before, would be useful in some situations, thank you.

[leonk5]

That worked like great. There's probably a lot more to this but in my case between all the commands and advice my folders are cleaned up. Hopefully I haven't deleted anything I needed. Theres one thing about fdupes to watch out and that is if you have the same file in 2 or more folders that you want to keep then be careful because fdupes will keep one file. I will mark this as solved.

This also works
find . -type f -name "*~" -exec rm {} + of course doing this after find . -type f -name "*~" > x