dupeutil

A command-line program written in Python for detecting and removing duplicate files

Table of contents

• Installation
• Usage
  • Arguments
    • Files flag
    • Quiet flag
    • Recursive flag

Installation

To install dupeutil, enter the following command in your terminal:

python -m pip install dupeutil

Usage

dupeutil is designed to be as effortless and as easy as possible to use. You can check for duplicate files in a directory by cd-ing into that directory and by simply entering the following command in your terminal:

dupeutil

That's it. The program will then check for duplicate files in the current working directory and provide you with a prompt that shows which duplicates were found and ask if you would like to remove them.

Alternatively, if you would like to check a particular directory without it being the current working directory, you can explicitly pass it a directory:

dupeutil <path to dir>

📝 NOTE: You may need to wrap the directory in quotes:

dupeutil "C:\Users\user\Downloads\folder"

Arguments

These are the available command-line arguments that you can pass to dupeutil. You can enter dupeutil -h or dupeutil --help in your terminal to view them as well.

positional arguments:
  dir                           the directory to check

options:
  -h, --help                    show this help message and exit
  -f FILES [FILES ...],         the files to compare
  --files FILES [FILES ...]

  -q, --quiet                   suppress output to the console; this option will not ask for
                                permission to  remove files
  -r, --recursive               include files in subdirectories
  -v, --version                 print program version

Files flag

If you'd rather compare files instead of a directory, you can do so by using the -f or --files flag:

dupeutil -f <path to file1> <path to file2> <path to file3> ... <path to fileN>

If any of the paths contain a space, it's recommended that you wrap them in quotes.

Quiet flag

If you don't want to see any output in the console, you can pass the -q or --quiet flag when you run dupeutil:

dupeutil <path to dir> -q

If you include the quiet flag, the program will not provide you with an overview of duplicate files, nor will it ask you for permission to remove those files.

Recursive flag

If you would like to include subdirectories in the given directory, pass the -r or --recursive flag:

dupeutil <path to dir> -r

Including this flag will cause files in the top-level directory and files in any subdirectories to be compared as well.