Recommend me a best duplicate file finder for Mac M2?

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.

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.

Ramburt wrote:

I was organizing the files on my MacBook M2 recently and found that the photos, documents, and materials had been piled up for several years. I guess there are a lot of duplicates. It's too troublesome to manually compare them one by one. I want to find a duplicate file finder tool that can automatically scan and identify duplicate files. It's better to preview them to avoid accidentally deleting important things.

My experience is that such apps create a lot of false positives. So, even if you use one, you still have to go through everything to make sure that it didn't flag something as a duplicate that really isn't.

You can go with the shasum, is a command-line duplicate file finder utility on Unix-based systems (like macOS.) It can be used to compute SHA checksums for files or strings. By default, it uses SHA-1, but it also supports stronger algorithms like SHA-256 or SHA-512 with the -a option.

shasum is ideal for finding duplicate files because it compares files by their actual content, not by name, size, or metadata. Even a 1-byte difference in file content will produce a completely different hash. Most importantly, it is scriptable and works well as duplicate file finder for mac in bulk via tools like find, sort, and awk.

Example:

shasum file1.mp3
shasum file2.mp3

If the output hash is the same, the files are likely identical, even if the names differ. This is a simple way to find and remove duplicate files on Mac.

On.

macOS.

There.

Are.

No.

Duplicate.

Files.

Q.E.D.