Explanation: asking for a program to effectively remove duplicates gives 14 programs that do essentially the same (therefore, making them duplicates).

Relevant XKCD:

https://xkcd.com/927/

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[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 23 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Why, it makes totally sense. One is done inefficiently, the next doesn't have feature X, this one does something entirely different and that one i don't like the programming language/approach.

[–] MonkeMischief@lemmy.today 10 points 2 weeks ago

"This one is just like the most popular one, but entirely rewritten in Rust!"

[–] ulterno@programming.dev 9 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Nice. I actually wanted a program to find duplicates and tell me, without doing anything to them, so that I can make decisions on a case-by-case basis.

Now I found 14 duplicates out of which some might fit my case.

[–] xtrapoletariat 8 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

I always found the actual challenge to decide what to get rid of once the duplicates where found.

Some tools I tried would also ask file-by-file, which I found a bit useless for thousand of files. Yet, I cannot even express a set of rules to decide this in general, so I'm not blaming the tools.

In particular, with picture collections I also came to the conclusion that some redundancy is probably ok rather than accidentially deleting data that I duplicated on purpose and simply forgot why.

[–] ulterno@programming.dev 5 points 2 weeks ago

Also, it is important that the tool recognises if the whole directory tree has been duplicated. e.g. if you duplicate an installation folder.

[–] MonkeMischief@lemmy.today 3 points 2 weeks ago

Exactly, with things like music or pictures, there's always that bit of doubt that makes it scary to actually delete anything...