Files with special characters were duplicated

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danielpicard
Posts: 1
Joined: Fri Feb 05, 2016 12:14 pm

Files with special characters were duplicated

Post by danielpicard »

Dear support community!

I think that I have a quite special duplicates problem. At least I was not able to find a solution after doing extensive Google research. :-)

Some time ago, I used a software on my hard disk that accidentally did quite strange things to many of my saved files. It created a duplicate of each file whos name contained one or more special characters (&, ', ~, ! ETC), where the special character always was replaced by an underscore sign. Here is an example to make this understandable:

A file called GirlsandBoys.txt was untouched by the process, whereas a file called Girls&Boys.txt has been duplicated and a second file called Girls_Boys.txt has been placed in the same folder.

This has been done with ALL my files which contain such characters, and since several of the files contain multi-media content, this is quite a waste of space. My wish is, of course, to get rid of all the copies which contain the _ but to keep the originals.


First I started to get rid of the files by hand, just by using the Windows Search to find all files containing special characters, but since my HD is quite big and contains more than 300.000 files, I had to accept quite soon that this manual work would probably last for ever. ^^

So I tried both your Duplicate Cleaner Free & Pro, but could not find a way to configure it to automatically find the files I wished to remove.

Maybe someone has some hints for me on how to do the job, I am slowly getting mad on seeing all the useless files every day.

Kind regards from Daniel.
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therube
Posts: 614
Joined: Tue Jun 28, 2011 4:38 pm

Re: Files with special characters were duplicated

Post by therube »

Set...

Regular Mode, Same Content
then,
Search Criteria | Search Filters | Include: *_*
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DigitalVolcano
Site Admin
Posts: 1717
Joined: Thu Jun 09, 2011 10:04 am

Re: Files with special characters were duplicated

Post by DigitalVolcano »

Try this

Regular mode, same content, find everything (*.*)

Then, use the "Select by Text Pattern" function (Selection assistant) and find everything with _ in the File Name column - that should do it. Be sure you aren't selecting legitimate files with underscores in though. Check for groups with all files selected.
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DigitalVolcano
Site Admin
Posts: 1717
Joined: Thu Jun 09, 2011 10:04 am

Re: Files with special characters were duplicated

Post by DigitalVolcano »

For more accuracy, use 'Similar filename' as well as the above
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