Linux Format forums

RE: Re: RE: Fdupes vs. whitespaces problem!

Toallpointswest — Tue Mar 27, 2007 10:33 pm

Author: Toallpointswest

Posted: Tue Mar 27, 2007 10:33 pm

Tried it on another directory, and I have the file list I expected, so I'll try it again.

EDIT: Okay tried it again and, it creates a listing of file names, with a blank line in between each line. I think that the error I'm seeing is rm trying to delete that blank line, as when I re-run fdupes on that directory it finds no dupes, so it is working.

RE: Re: RE: Fdupes vs. whitespaces problem!

nelz — Tue Mar 27, 2007 4:53 pm

Author: nelz

Posted: Tue Mar 27, 2007 4:53 pm

More likely that the variable contained something rm didn't like. It should have deleted everything up to the dodgy item, so try

Code:

fdupes --recurse --omitfirst <directory> | head

to see what comes next.

Re: RE: Fdupes vs. whitespaces problem!

Toallpointswest — Tue Mar 27, 2007 4:47 pm

Author: Toallpointswest

Posted: Tue Mar 27, 2007 4:47 pm

nelz wrote:

xargs doesn't handle filenames with spaces at all well. If you replace "| xargs rm" with

Code:

| while read f; do rm "$f"; done

your spaced put files should be deleted correctly.

That did something, but now I get:

Quote:

rm: cannot remove `':No such file or directory

So it looks like it didn't pass the variable correctly

RE: Fdupes vs. whitespaces problem!

nelz — Tue Mar 27, 2007 9:27 am

Author: nelz

Posted: Tue Mar 27, 2007 9:27 am

xargs doesn't handle filenames with spaces at all well. If you replace "| xargs rm" with

Code:

| while read f; do rm "$f"; done

your spaced put files should be deleted correctly.

RE: Fdupes vs. whitespaces problem!

Kev1729 — Tue Mar 27, 2007 1:57 am

Author: Kev1729

Posted: Tue Mar 27, 2007 1:57 am

If you use it with the --delete flag it works fine, else if you are using your own script (or indeed one that came with the mag, shows how much i read it) to delete the files you would need to escape the filenames first.

Fdupes vs. whitespaces problem!

Toallpointswest — Tue Mar 27, 2007 1:06 am

Author: Toallpointswest

Posted: Tue Mar 27, 2007 1:06 am

I've been trying the fdupes command from this months issue to find and delete duplicate files

Quote:

fdupes --recurse --omitfirst <directory> |xargs rm

And every time it comes across a file or pathname with a whitespace in it I get the following error:

Quote:

rm: cannot remove '<file or directory with whitespace>': No such file or directory

Any ideas how I can get this command to work properly? Thanks!