find unique files over two directories

  • Thread starter Thread starter Boco Merci
  • Start date Start date
B

Boco Merci

I have two seperate main directories filled up with files in
subdirectories. Most of the files are in both directories, though not
necessarily in the equivalent subdirectory and not necessarily with
the same file name.
Any prog that finds the files that are only in one of the main
directories?
 
Boco Merci said:
I have two seperate main directories filled up with files in
subdirectories. Most of the files are in both directories, though not
necessarily in the equivalent subdirectory and not necessarily with
the same file name.
Any prog that finds the files that are only in one of the main
directories?
Click to expand...

-If- all you'd written was that final question, then I'd say ThirdDir
<http://rvas.webzdarma.cz/>.

Perhaps someone will come up with a good match for what you seek. Yet
in case not, then I'll go ahead and post what I think. It's that you
might end up needing to reconsider, and instead approaching the project
in the usual way. By hunting dupes (on a mirrored copy of the dirs).

For hunting dupes, you have a number of utilities available. Within
the range of those utils, you can get abilities to hunt dupes across
the two parent directories, where it won't matter that matches are in
varied subdirs, also abilities to select match criteria such as ignoring
filename.

If you do take this road, then the first one I'd recommend right off,
it's TreeComp. <http://www.xs4all.nl/~lploeger/TreeComp3.htm>. I suppose
this is called a directory synchronizer, not simply a dupes killer; but
these kind of purposes can sort of overlap. You can have TreeComp delete /
copy / move. I've found TreeComp very strong for when dealing with pairs
of similar-but-different directories which have a number of subdirectories.
It gives a great overview of what is going on. Including visual cues
telling one right away whether a subdir within the tree is fully matched,
fully unique, or different by one or more files. And also lets you do any
synchronizing, or deleting, one step at a time, if feeling conservative.

TreeComp won't do the part about same files in varied subdirectories. For
that, I'd pull out a followup utility, a dedicated dupes finder, after
getting the first major round done with TreeComp.

.. . .
(One more note. It has just occurred to me that I don't have to assume
necessarily that you are dealing with large trees with a great number of
differences. In which case, it might be most suitable to skip the whole
process of the dupes kill on mirrored copy of those. That instead, TreeComp
will provide you its flagging of the unique + differing files, adequate to
your needs, and that you can just poke about from there.)
 
I have two seperate main directories filled up with files
in subdirectories. Most of the files are in both
directories, though not necessarily in the equivalent
subdirectory and not necessarily with the same file name.
Any prog that finds the files that are only in one of the
main directories?
Click to expand...

Here is a little known M$ tool you may find interesting:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q243424/
 
Boco Merci said:
I have two seperate main directories filled up with files in
subdirectories. Most of the files are in both directories, though not
necessarily in the equivalent subdirectory and not necessarily with
the same file name.
Any prog that finds the files that are only in one of the main
directories?
Click to expand...

New approach occurred to me. Get a directory listing done, output to csv.
Pref choosing one of the utils that will provide a checksum column in
output. Here you can use, for example, "Karen's Directory Printer," or
Skorczynski's "Directory Lister." Then process that file (combined
directory listing of your two targets), to eliminate line where there
are dupes in the checksum column. Here you can use, for example, Sam
Franke's "CSVEd." For your final list of unique files, don't know how
you wish to utilize it. You could convert it to html, if want. Or convert
it to a batch to copy the unique files elsewhere.
 
Or you could use dupeless.

However, I'm not sure if it is free anymore, but it does a good job!
 
Back
Top