File Compare Utilities

Does anyone know of a utility that will compare the files in two folders and delete any duplicates? A buddy of mine had recently copied some music to an external hard drive of mine and now we have quite a few dupes. I want to get rid of as many as I can in an automated way, if possible.

 

ultracompare professional (www.ultraedit.com) will compare folders, but you have to manually go through and do any deletes.

 

Is it any different than using the search utility in XP and doing a *.mp3 search? That's what I'm doing now, but will take forever.

 

You point it to two directories and it gives you side by side comparisons. Files in one and not in the other are highlighted. Files that have different contents but same names are highlighted. It searches subdirs too, but you have to drill down to get to them.

I use it mainly for programming, or to compare versions of files before an upgrade - like with vbulletin or moveable type when I haven't bothered to make a cvs project.

Here's a screenshot:

 

Are you running Windows XP, Infinterb?

If so, install windiff.exe from your XP setup CD...

Start | Run... {drive}:\SUPPORT\TOOLS\SETUP.EXE or {drive}:\SUPPORT\TOOLS\SUPTOOLS.MSI

 

May be I am missing something but I don't understand the need for all these programs.
Do you want to keep the files in 2 folder, or 1 folder will be ok?

If you want everything in 1 folder, just copy everything from folder 1 to folder 2 with over write and then delete folder 1, all the duplicates are over written and originals from folder 1 are copied to folder 2.

If you want in seperate folders, now just view folder 2 in detail mode and sort by date, all the files from folder 1 have the today's date, just select those with today's date and copy it back to folder 1.

 

Or... ignore windiff and ultracompare and do what gworld said

Sometimes, we humans get too complicated for out own good...

 

Exactly.

i was thinking for a bit and was like...wait a minute, why don't I just copy these over each other and just over write them. So, now I am doing that.

Thanks guys.

 

You know us computer programmers. Always making things more difficult than necessary

 

Works as long as, one directories file should always take precidence over the others, and you are not worried about files with the same name but different content.

 

jbw, I was worried since some of the mp3s were better quality than others. So I babysat the copy procedure and made sure the better quality ones (larger file size) were being copied.