I hope this is the right place for this post...

I have a shell script (I have forgotten the original author) that will search recursively through directories looking for duplicate files, It then generates a second script to remove the duplicates with one file per line. Each file is commented out. I would like to be able to automatically remove the comment from one of the lines. Then I can run script to delete the duplicate files, in this case they are .jpg files.

I will include part of the script as an example:
I would like to remove the comment from one file leave the other (oldest date) commented out. In the following example I would like to remove the comment from the lines that have been placed in bold. Any help would be greatly appreciated, the actual file is huge somewhere around 2072 lines.

#! /bin/sh
#rm ./2006-05-09/100_4375.jpg
#rm ./2006-06-25/100_4375.jpg

#rm ./2006-08-04/100_4906.jpg
#rm ./2006-08-26/100_4906.jpg
#rm ./2006-10-21/100_4906.jpg

#rm ./2004-11-25/100b0270.jpg
#rm ./2004-12-24/100b0270.jpg


tmbigrigg

Wouldn't it be better to post the (D/L location of) the script? With all due respect but writing a kludge for this instead of the source seems a bit of a waste of time.

Here is where I found the original script: http://elonen.iki.fi/code/misc-notes...les/index.html

OUTF=rem-duplicates.sh;
echo "#! /bin/sh" > $OUTF;
find "$@" -type f -print0 |
xargs -0 -n1 md5sum |
sort --key=1,32 | uniq -w 32 -d --all-repeated=separate |
sed -r 's/^[0-9a-f]*( )*//;s/([^a-zA-Z0-9./_-])/\\\1/g;s/(.+)/#rm \1/' >> $OUTF;
chmod a+x $OUTF; ls -l $OUTF

to selectively modify certain lines in a file, you would have to be able to define some common attribute. In your example, it appears that the common attribute is that you want to modify based on folder names which are dates later than the first one in the list. This might be messy.

An easier algorithm would be to remove everything except the first entry in a group. Then you can simply loop on the file name, removing all instances after the first one.

You are probably not going to find an easy way to do what you want to do in a bash script.

If you are determined to use a script, you will probably have to use Perl, PHP, Python, etc.

I am a programmer, so I would write a C program to do this, but that option is not available to everyone.