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I need a command line tool to remove duplicate files.

There are several. But I could not find one which always keeps the older files and deletes the newer versions.

I tried finddup, duff, fdupes. Maybe I was blind, but AFAIK there was not way to tell the tools to keep the older file.

guettli
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  • This may help http://askubuntu.com/q/3865/178596 – Wilf May 26 '15 at 20:40
  • I'd say it is possible to script what you want. Find the duplicate files, then compare their timestamps with stat . I might try doing something like that later, but I'm not on my machine right now, so I can only suggest a thing – Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy May 26 '15 at 21:51
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    @Wilf the AskUbuntu question you mention lists a lot of tools. I tried three (or even more) tools, before asking myself. All of them seem to have not option which file to keep if you use auto-delete. – guettli May 27 '15 at 05:28

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Probably too late for the O.P. but maybe useful to others:

rmlint --rank-by m [paths]

... will search in [paths] for duplicate files and create a shell script (rmlint.sh) that you can use to delete the duplicates. The --rank-by m option tells it to keep the file with the oldest mtime in each set. There are also several other original selection criteria options

thomas_d_j
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