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A perl script to list duplicate files
Authored by: fri2219 on Mar 02, '06 07:57:54AM

Your antecedent reference wasn't clear: File::Compare as an alternative to Digest::MD5?

If so, I'm not sure you can flatly state that File::Compare would be less expensive (in terms of execution time?) for all comparison operations than Digest::MD5. There must be (pathological) cases where that isn't true- something like Digest::SHA1 or even Digest::CRC might be a middle path in the case of sparse files.

This would be a nice weekend experiment over a large sample of files, with distributions of sparse files and compressed formats... I'm sure a well designed experiment run by a team of actuaries and industrial engineers could clear this up emprically. (And no, my 400Mhz G4 isn't going to cut it :)

My working hypothesis is the file composition would probably determine what the results looked like, followed by how well the implementation is optimized for any given machine's processor.



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