Marking Duplicate Files

[MrBiggy]

After a search for duplicate files is there any way to mark the appropriate files by these criteria?

1. Mark all files in a group except the one with the shortest file name.

2. All files on a specific drive. Explanation> You do a duplicate search on multiple drives simultaneously and want to only mark the files on one of the drives. e.g. you find duplicate files abc.xyz on drive c: and file def.ghi on drive h:. You only want to mark the file on c:.

Thanks for any help!

[milo1012]

After a search for duplicate files is there any way to mark the appropriate files by these criteria?

After you fed the results to the list box:
Just hit Numpad+ ("Expand selection") or the corresponding menu command.
In there you now have very detailed options for selecting such files.

(you need TC 8.5 for that)

[MrBiggy]

Thank you for your reply.

The only file property selection criteria I see on the drop-down list of that dialog are as follows:

Newest
Oldest
Largest
Smallest
First in Group
Last in Group

I don't see any option for "Shortest File Name" or "Longest File Name".

Also...

There is a "Select by Folder" tab for selecting files only from certain folders on that dialog, but I also don't see a way to set it for selecting files only from certain drives. It only seems to allow selecting by folder, not by drive.

[milo1012]

Well, the "shortest file name" is indeed not possible, because TC doesn't have options to compare the members from within a group with custom options,
but in the field "select by name/extension" you can select files from a certain drive with a regular expression:
e.g.

Code: Select all

<d:

to select all files from drive d:

For the name length compare it won't be easy to find a solution, even with an external program, as you need to preserve the group order.
If you have only two files per group then you could export the results as a list of file names (mark all files and use TC's cm_CopyFullNamesToClip command), copy it to a text file and use some script on it that removes the shorter name from it, copy the modified file content to clipboard and use the TC command cm_LoadSelectionFromClip.

[MrBiggy]

Very nice solution for the select by drive! Thank you. I will try that.

And also a very clever workaround for the select by the length of the file name issue although I'm sure you will agree it is of very limited use.

It's a shame that there are no options listed for "Shortest File Name" and "Longest File Name" Those are pretty standard options in most duplicate file finding utilities and probably the most critical criteria for my needs.

That isn't to say that I am not impressed with TCs duplicate finder feature. Other than maybe a few basic missing things I would like to see like these options, it is beautifully done and quite powerful.

Is there a place for me to post this feature request? Or is this post seen by anyone who can consider that request?

Even knowing that something can't be done takes a lot of expertise. Thank you again for your expert help! Impressive!

[milo1012]

Is there a place for me to post this feature request?

There is an entire forum section dedicated to suggestions.
Maybe link to this thread if you post the suggestion in there.