Files with special characters were duplicated
Posted: Fri Feb 05, 2016 12:39 pm
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.
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.