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FDUPES(1) General Commands Manual FDUPES(1)

NAME

jdupes - finds and performs actions upon duplicate files

SYNOPSIS

jdupes [ options ] DIRECTORY ...

DESCRIPTION

Searches the given path(s) for duplicate files. Such files are found by comparing file sizes, then partial and full file hashes, followed by a byte-by-byte comparison.

OPTIONS

exclude hidden files from consideration
issue the btrfs same-extents ioctl to trigger a deduplication on disk. The program must be built with btrfs support for this option to be available
if this feature is compiled in, show debugging statistics and info at the end of program execution
prompt user for files to preserve, deleting all others (see CAVEATS below)
omit the first file in each set of matches
normally, when two or more files point to the same disk area they are treated as non-duplicates; this option will change this behavior
displays help
reverse (invert) the sort order of matches
isolate each command-line parameter from one another; only match if the files are under different parameter specifications
replace all duplicate files with hardlinks to the first file in each set of duplicates
summarize duplicate files information
when used together with --delete, preserve the first file in each set of duplicates and delete the others without prompting the user
exclude zero-length files from consideration
parameter order preservation is more important than the chosen sort; this is particularly useful with the -N option to ensure that automatic deletion behaves in a controllable way
order files according to WORD: time - sort by modification time name - sort by filename (default)
don't consider files with different owner/group or permission bits as duplicates
[WARNING: RISK OF DATA LOSS, SEE CAVEATS] skip byte-for-byte verification of duplicate pairs (use hashes only)
hide progress indicator
for each directory given after this option follow subdirectories encountered within (note the ':' at the end of option; see the Examples section below for further explanation)
for every directory given follow subdirectories encountered within
show size of duplicate files
follow symlinked directories
display jdupes version and compilation feature flags
exclude files of size less than SIZE from consideration, or if SIZE is prefixed with a '+' i.e. jdupes -x +226 [files] then exclude files larger than SIZE. The following suffixes can be used and are not case-sensitive:
`K'
for kilobytes (units of 1024 bytes)
`M'
for megabytes (units of 1024 x 1024 bytes)
`G'
for gigabytes (units of 1024 x 1024 x 1024 bytes)
if the user aborts the program (as with CTRL-C) act on the matches that were found before the abort was received. For example, if -L and -Z are specified, all matches found prior to the abort will be hard linked. The default behavior without -Z is to abort without taking any actions.

NOTES

A set of arrows are used in hard linking to show what action was taken on each link candidate. These arrows are as follows:

---->
This file was successfully hard linked to the first file in the duplicate chain
-==->
This file was already a hard link to the first file in the chain
-//->
Hard linking this file failed due to an error during the linking process

Duplicate files are listed together in groups with each file displayed on a separate line. The groups are then separated from each other by blank lines.

EXAMPLES

will follow subdirectories under b, but not those under a.
will follow subdirectories under both a and b.
will always place 'dir1' results first in any match set (where relevant)

CAVEATS

When using -d or --delete, care should be taken to insure against accidental data loss.

-Z or --softabort used to be --hardabort in jdupes prior to v1.5 and had the opposite behavior. Defaulting to taking action on abort is probably not what most users would expect. The decision to invert rather than reassign to a different switch was made because this feature was still fairly new at the time of the change.

The -O or --paramorder option allows the user greater control over what appears in the first position of a match set, specifically for keeping the -N option from deleting all but one file in a set in a seemingly random way. All directories specified on the command line will be used as the sorting order of result sets first, followed by the sorting algorithm set by the -o or --order option. This means that the order of all match pairs for a single directory specification will retain the old sorting behavior even if this option is specified.

When used together with options -s or --symlink, a user could accidentally preserve a symlink while deleting the file it points to.

Furthermore, when specifying a particular directory more than once, all files within that directory will be listed as their own duplicates, leading to data loss should a user preserve a file without its "duplicate" (the file itself!).

The -Q or --quick option only reads each file once, hashes it, and performs comparisons based solely on the hashes. There is a small but significant risk of a hash collision which is the purpose of the failsafe byte-for-byte comparison that this option explicitly bypasses. Do not use it on ANY data set for which any amount of data loss is unacceptable. This option is not included in the help text for the program due to its risky nature. You have been warned!

REPORTING BUGS

Send all bug reports to jody@jodybruchon.com or use the Issue tracker at http://github.com/jbruchon/jdupes/issues

AUTHOR

jdupes is a fork of 'fdupes' which is maintained by and contains extra code copyrighted by Jody Bruchon <jody@jodybruchon.com>

jdupes was once called 'fdupes-jody' but the name was changed at the request of Adrian Lopez to avoid confusion between the two programs.

Based on 'fdupes' created by Adrian Lopez <adrian2@caribe.net>