[ILUG] Same data on several computers

[Brian Foster]

  | Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2005 00:31:00 +0100
  | From: Colm MacCarthaigh <colm at stdlib.net>
  | 
  | On Sun, Jun 12, 2005 at 03:33:29PM +0100, Timothy Murphy wrote:
  |  > I have innumerable files scattered over four or five computers,
  |  > and I would like to work out which are the same, [ ... ]
  | 
  | I can't recommend much in the way of an program that will rationalise
  | the existing clutter, although a short script doing;
  | 
  | 	find $wherever -type f | xargs md5sum
  | 
  | with a central "sort" would be easy enough.  [ ... ]

 not to belabour the obvious, but the above only gives
 a quick fingerprint of which files _may_ be identical.
 cmp(1) is the arbitrator of true identicalness.
 that is, _I_ would never ever delete files deemed
 “identical” only by a fingerprint (checksum) without
 also doing a `cmp' to confirm.  (and even then,
 there is an issue of files which have identical
 contents, but are not actually the “same” file.
 let's not go there ....  ;-)  )

cheers!
	-blf-

p.s.  I concur with Colm's suggestion to use a decent
      versioning system (which excludes CVS, IMHO) to
      avoid some instances of this problem.

-- 
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