delete duplicate files windows

November 15, 2012

The best tool i’ve found to delete duplicate files windows is sfk (aka “Swiss File Knife”).

Installation

1. Download Swiss File knife from there homepage

2. Extract and copy to C:\windows

Usage

sfk dupfind -dir anydir [-file .ext1 .ext2]

find and list duplicate files.

options
-diffdirs list only duplicates residing in different
root directories. this option requires that
you specify at least two dirs after -dir.
-listorg list all original filenames,
leave out any duplicate filenames.
-minsize=n compare only files with size >= n.
examples for n are:
5m = 5000000 bytes (5 mbytes)
100k = 100000 bytes (5 kbytes)
1M = 1048576 bytes (2<<20 bytes)
9000b = 9000 bytes

command chaining
– by default, this command passes the names
of found duplicate files to the next command.

– option -listorg does the opposite: it passes
only original filenames, but no duplicates,
to the next chain command.

NOTE:
if identical files are found, the decision what is listed
as “original” or “duplicate” is currently based on the
order in the file system: the file found first is listed as
“original”. check carefully if this is what you think,
before cleaning up any duplicates.

examples
sfk dupfind .
find all duplicates within the current directory tree.

sfk dupfind -dir docs1 docs2 docs3
find all dups across and within the given directories.

sfk dupfind -diffdir -dir docs1 docs2 docs3
find dups between docs1/docs2, docs2/docs3, docs1/docs3,
but does NOT list dups within the same root directory.

sfk dupfind docs .doc +del
find all duplicate .doc files, within the docs
directory tree, and delete them.

sfk dupfind -listorg docs .doc +run “copy $file docs2”
copy all .doc files from docs to docs2,
but leave out any duplicate files.

sfk dupfind -dir pic1 -dir pic2 -dir pic3
find duplicates across three different directory trees.
specifying multiple -dirs is also a way of influencing
the result order; if a file is found both in pic1 and pic3,
the file from pic1 will be listed as original, the other one
as the duplicate.

sfk sel -dir pic1 pic2 pic3 -file .jpg +dup -minsize=1m
similar to the above, this example uses command chaining:
list all .jpg files from the pic directories, then pass
this to the dupfind command, also filtering by size.

Actually deleting the dupes

From current directory

cd "c:\some\path"
sfk dupfind +del! .