On Fri, 15 Sep 2006 07:04:27 -0500, Otis Mukinfus
<ph***@emailaddress.comwrote:
>On Fri, 15 Sep 2006 06:44:31 -0400, rob <ro*@nospam.comwrote:
>>Does anyone know of a duplicate file checker project in C#? Couldn't
locate anything on CodeProject or SourceForge.
Has anyone here considered writing one?
>What do you mean by duplicate file checker?
Do you want to compare the content of two files, or do you want to see if a file
exists in more than one place on a drive or drives?
I should have said "Finder" rather than "Checker".
Dupe finders usually track down multiple copies of one file existing
within a set of folders. Used for hunting down disk-hogging
duplicates of large files. Differences in commercial/PD dupe-finders
are primarily the UI, but there are also variations on the method for
fingerprinting files (no assumptions are made that the names or dates
are identical). The usual approach is to identify files by doing an
MD5 or sorting by size and doing a byte-by-byte compare (BTW, I can't
see why the MD5 would be any faster than byte-by-byte, except if more
than two copies of one file are present).
So it's a matter of recursing through folder structures, logging
files, then finding out if they are duplicates. The process after
that is usually where things are missing. Everyone has their own
ideas about how to deal with the dupes after they are located.
Given the need to customize the UI, I thought this would be one of the
most-hacked types of programs out there, but I found nothing in C# on
Sourceforge.
By the way, my own interest is just for my own use, not for any
commercial endeavor. It would be a cool thing to post as a community
effort, so I was surprised it had not been done.