I have found Fsearch brilliant when deleting back ups of back ups of back ups etc.... BUT... Use = Wisdom.

[Phuxxi]

There is what I call the "Hanson 1001 Theorum" - where if you have to use or do something (theoretically) 1001 times, unless it's really, really brilliant and properly sorted, your going to find all the bugs and unnecessary steps - that need to be removed.

This concerns deleting groups of identical files, like 6 to 42 identical files, keep one, but delete all the rest, and there is like 40,000 groups of files....

I select all the files I want to delete, these go to the rubbish bin - so that is a fail safe in case of error.

But this response needs to be removed - probably by a choice in a manual setting.

Deleting it when delete is pressed, is prefereable when one gains expereience and has a LOT of deleting to do.

Secondly there is a limit, where once one selects 20 + files for deletion, this message comes up and requires additional steps, of changing it from cancel to delete, and then hitting delete.

And then it's followed by this - again:

These just create MORE unnecessary time and work, when one has zillions of duplicate files to delete.....

It need a simple interface and "power users" interface settings.

If you want some help sorting it out - I have millions of files to delete..... 50,000 pictures / videos / documents of a defective circuit / kettle / shitty outdoors photos, etc and 8 to 36 copies of every one of them.....

Just the multiples - soaks up HUGE amounts of disk space and bogs the back ups right down....

Thus select delete, select delete, select delete, select delete, select delete, without the acknowledgement of the "Yes I do know I am deleting them" and "Yes I do know I am deleting more than 20 of them" - it just eats up time.

Cheers.

AND here is the PDF manual for it.

I might have to have a go at this coding to bypass the "acknowledgement functions" of in excess of 20 files at a time and the automatic data base update is coming" are by passed and material is deleted straight to the rubbish bin.

Fsearch Syntax.pdf

The Automatic Database update after deleting / moving / copying files is good for limited amounts of files in a search - but not for removing 4 million files from a 5 million file data base.....

Just a thought and observation.

Better to close the program every 8 hours and reopen it and then let it update it's self, otherwise it can get bogged down in updating the data base when I am just working my way through the list by the 10's of thousands... of deletions every hour.