DUDE is an acronym used by Duplicate Detector and is formed by joining the first two letters of its title. It is a cross-platform application for finding and removing the duplicate files from your system. It is available for two major desktop platforms – Windows and Linux.
It is a GUI utility but the package also comes with a command line version of the tool. The command line version can be included easily in batch scripts and scheduled task commands. It can also be integrated with the shell commands in a file manager.
As we launch DUDE, the very first thing we have to do is select and add the folders to be scanned for duplicates. Once the scanning is finished, all the duplicate files found are displayed in its window. It displays the groups of duplicates files using two panels. The top panel shows a list of duplicate files grouped together.
The lower panel displays the files in a standard list view mode. Both panels display the CRC32 hash of the files which is also used to compare them.
We can right-click on the duplicate files to find the options to delete them or to move them to a separate folder. We can also create shortcut or hard/soft links to these files to easily find them later. By default, it does not allow removal of all the files from a duplicate group. But we can change the settings of this application and make it remove all the files from a duplicate files group.
We can filter the duplicate files using regular expressions search. This application can also find similar images which are not identical by their content, but are visually similar. We can have a preview of the image and text files so that we can instantly compare the similar files.
You can download Duplicates Detector (DUDE) from https://github.com/PJDude/dude.