How to Find duplicate files

Let’s say you have a folder with 5000 MP3 files you want to check for duplicates. Or a directory containing thousands of EPUB files, all with different names but you have a hunch some of them might be duplicates. You can cd your way in the console up to that particular folder and then do a

find -not -empty -type f -printf “%s\n” | sort -rn | uniq -d | xargs -I{} -n1 find -type f -size {}c -print0 | xargs -0 md5sum | sort | uniq -w32 --all-repeated=separate

This will output a list of files that are duplicates, according tot their HASH signature.
Another way is to install fdupes and do a

fdupes -r ./folder > duplicates_list.txt

The -r is for recursivity. Check the duplicates_list.txt afterwards in a text editor for a list of duplicate files.

Using find to search files

Looking for something? Find has all the power you’ll need to locate any file or directory on your system, as long as you know the name of what you’re trying to find.

First you’ll need to launch a terminal session, and then we’ll dive into this by typing the following command.

find / -name 'my-file.txt' 2>/dev/null

Breaking down our ‘ find ‘ command

• ‘ / ‘ - is our search location, since we’re using / it’ll search everything on our root partition


• ‘ -name ‘ - says we’re gonna search by name, and we can type anything in here (* wildcard)


• ‘ 2>/dev/null ‘ - will tell the shell to pipe all errors to dev/null meaning they wont be displayed