Tell me more ×
Super User is a question and answer site for computer enthusiasts and power users. It's 100% free, no registration required.
up vote 1 down vote favorite

What I would like to do is to use Explorer to locate all the files with the same names in a given folder and all of its sub-folders.

Example...

C:\Photos\20070113\20070113065.jpg
C:\Photos\20070110\20070113065.jpg
C:\Photos\20070108\20070113065.jpg

As you can see from this example, my problem is that I have the same JPEG files with the same names in more than one sub-folder. For some reason they have been misplaced in the wrong folders (dates don't match with the folders). I have some 2800 JPEG files in this root. But only maybe 10% are duplicates.

Is there some kind of mask I can use in the search field in Explorer so that it only shows me files that have the same name?

Something like *.jpg [same file name]?

share|improve this question

2 Answers

up vote 2 down vote

You can search from a CMD window with the following commands:

cd \
dir /s filename.jpg

This will search all subdirs in drive C: for 'filename.jpg'

share|improve this answer
Note that this will only scan for one duplicate name at a time. Not very useful when there's a large number of potential candidates. – efotinis Nov 25 '12 at 8:48
up vote -1 down vote

Is there some kind of mask I can use in the search field in Explorer so that it only shows me files that have the same name?

no

You might consider

  • a de-duplication tool
  • a script in Powershell or another scripting language

See also How to check for duplicate files? and Free Duplicate mp3 finder

share|improve this answer
What is "deduplication" you refer to in this context? There is a Wikipedia article saying that "data deduplication is a specialized data compression technique for eliminating coarse-grained redundant data." Is this something else or is it just a fancy way of saying "file duplicate finder"? Data compression is not what I want to achieve here, so that seems way off. – Sammy Jun 8 '12 at 22:44
When I google "file deduplication", one of the first links points to a LifeHacker article that covers some tools like WinMerge, among others. But WinMerge is really a file and folder comparison and merging tool. This type of tools usually can't hunt for duplicate files. They were not designed for this. Primarily! Although they can do some folder to folder comparison and let you know which (if any) files are the same. I use Beyond Compare for this a lot. – Sammy Jun 8 '12 at 22:46
To add to the point, they usually only use file names as criteria for the analysis, they do no CRC or MD5 hashing to find exact copies. Maybe some of them can do a binary comparison in addition to a file name comparison to get more accurate results. Or add the last modified date into the equation. – Sammy Jun 8 '12 at 22:51
Since my duplicate files have the same names, this would seem like a good choice then. But unfortunately merge and diff tools don't process the files... how do you say it, recursively?... so you have to have one folder full of files as the base for the compare, to which you then compare another folder full of files. So to compare C:\Photos\20070113 to the C:\Photos you have to first move the child-folder away from its parent and place it on either C:\ or maybe D:\ in this case, and then do the compare. And also I would like to chose which file duplicates to delete based on their meta-data... – Sammy Jun 8 '12 at 22:55
I will not elaborate any more on this. I think you understand what I mean. There simply are no good tools to do this with. The diff and merge type of tools don't work very well for this application. And the "double file hunter", and the trillions of "duplicate file finder" type of tools are often not very good. Most of them are shareware, crapware and bloatware. A handful of them are freeware tools that no one even uses or supports, not even the tool makers. There is not one "file hunter" or "duplicate finder" that you can depend on. – Sammy Jun 8 '12 at 23:08
show 2 more comments

Your Answer

 
discard

By posting your answer, you agree to the privacy policy and terms of service.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.