Recommend me a best duplicate file finder for Mac M2?

mechanic1357 wrote:

So please tell us what these deleted files are in ~/Trash? They don't look like links but like real files with listed sizes. Bash shows some detail, and the shell tells us that they are real files, not links.

I have no idea what files are in your Trash. I don't recommend looking directly in "~/.Trash". The "Trash" is a Finder artifact. The fact that it is currently implemented as a hidden directory in your home directory (in some cases) doesn't mean that you should ever make use of that. This has nothing to do with your question, but since you mentioned ~/.Trash, I thought I should caution you about it.

Links are older file system artifacts. There are a few different kinds of links. They all require some special procedure to create. If you copy or duplicate a file on a modern system, it will create a clone. A clone will be identical to the original in every way. It will be a file, not a link.

The file system has poor support for identifying when file is a clone. So any app that is reporting a "duplicate file" probably hasn't been able to identify the file as a clone. Deleting that clone will recover zero bytes of data.

Furthermore, if you make any changes to a clone or a file that has been cloned, then you'll wind up with a partial clone. Any duplicate file finder app will report that the file as not a duplicate, when it could be 99.9999% duplicated data.

The operating system automatically prevents most duplicate files. You would really have to go out of your way, using an external drive, in order to create a duplicate file in the first place.

You can follow this simple tricks to find duplicate files on Mac. It works on intel and apple silicon mac.

On.

macOS.

There.

Are.

No.

Duplicate.

Files.

Q.E.D.

mechanic1357 wrote:

Great contribution, Idris!

Thanks?

It was an answer to a specific question. If the person I responded to has more questions about that, they are free to ask them.