Introduction
SameSame is a collection of tools that fall in the category of file management software. These tools can prevent that you need to delete files or buy more disk space. Instead they solve low disk space problems by linking duplicate files together and thus free up waisted disk space.
This collection was inspired by the application samefile written by Jens Schweikhardt. The collection comes with its own version of samefile that is noticeable faster and is able to process a much larger file list.
This port contains two sets of applications: the first are duplicate files finder, they search for files with identical content, and the second are duplicate file removers, they perform some kind of action based on those results. The main engine, samefile, uses a true byte-to-byte comparison that is as fast as a MD5 comparison, that prevents false positives and and ensures that duplicate files are exactly the same in content.
Typical usage would be: find . | samefile -i | sameln
This would search for identical files and clean up wasted disk space by linking them together. You can see on the right what whould happen if two duplicate files where to be found. If you prefer removing one of the identical file, then you should replace samelink with samerm. You can add the option -vn after both application for a verbose dry-run.
Please see the man page samesame for a introduction to all applications.
Features comparison with other apllication
| SameSame | samefile | dupfind | fdupes | filedupe | ftwin | weedit | |
| Search and report duplicate files | YES | YES | YES | YES | YES | YES | YES |
| Guanteed identical content | YES | YES | YES | YES | no | YES | no |
| Control results | YES | kinda | no | no | no | no | no |
| Delete duplicate files | YES | no | no | YES | no | no | YES |
| Hard link duplicate files together | YES | no | no | no | no | no | no |
| Move, copy, ect. duplicate files | YES | no | no | no | no | no | no |
| Persistency | no | no | no | no | YES | no | YES |
- Guanteed identical content: programs who fail this assume that duplicate files contain identical content if the fingerprints of those file matches.
- Control results: programs that will report the matches based on users input.
- Persistency: this can speed the process up, but can also produce faulty results.
Install
You can install these collections of tools using the build in
mechanism of FreeBSD
or download the latest version from the website. The latest
available download is:
tar.bz2 (~110K) |
src.rpm (~125K) |
tar.gz (~150K) |
dsc |
more info...
There may also exist a development version on the server. This version is not published because the contence can change over time. In edition it should be considerd unstable.
About the author
The collection SameSame was written by Alex de Kruijff <samesame@akruijf.dds.nl>. Please use this adress for your bug report (preferably with a patch). On my website you can find more articles about FreeBSD.