With those details in mind, I suspect that if you run your script repeatedly in succession on the same path, it will find/rename/replace/delete the same set of duplicate files, more or less identically, on each run.

You are right. At first I thought it was a bug in my script, but then I realized that, as there is no way of recognizing a hard link as such, repeated runs of the program on the same directory will report identical results.

I think the *n*x notion of "symlinks" ports to MS-Windows as "short-cuts", so this may be somewhat more portable, but you'd have to look at the sources for F::F::Dups to see whether it picks up on the difference between a data file and any sort of link.

I checked the source of the module, and it only reports real duplicates. Soft links are discarded by the -f file test, wich returns 0 if the "element" is a directory or a soft link.

However, I'm only now thinking about the posibility of creating soft links and the consequences that I might have. I hadn't considered the possibility of running the script in a non-unix envirnomnet either.

And that brings up another point you might want to test with your script: does F::F::Dups know enough to leave symlinks alone, or does it follow them when looking for dups?

Luckily enough, it doesn't.
F::F::Dups uses File::Find with somewhat default options, and in that regard the default is not to follow links. So the problem that you most correctly point out is not an issue here (but thanks for mentioning it because I hadn't considered it!).


In reply to Re^2: Replace duplicate files with hardlinks by Anonymous Monk
in thread Replace duplicate files with hardlinks by bruno

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.