On a more constructive level, I have written a first version of the program. It's only slightly optimised but appears to be quite fast already. It will also print stats at the end which show the potential gain as well as the number of bytes read vs. the total number of bytes in the potentially identical files (i.e. having the same length).

Maybe it's clearer now what my intention was.

You can find it at: http://www.homepages.lu/pu/finddups.txt (the webserver at vo would not serve finddups.py).

Everybody, please feel free to try it and to give me your feedback. Of course, I would not recommend running it on a production machine yet, of course.

Thanks.
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Copyright (C) 2005 Patrick Useldinger

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2
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This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307, USA.

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