Comparing folder contents

Hi all
This is a it embarrassing to be honest, but I find myself in a bit of a filing based mess.
The background - skip if you don't want to hear bleating about how poor my filing is
In a fit of idiocy I have made many duplicate folders (including multiple duplicates of content such as my 15,000 image photo library) to ensure safety of the files therein. I've done this a lot of the last three years, and find myself now in a position where I haven't got a clue what is where, and what is up-to-date.
I have 600G odd drive space.
I have 1 50G iMovie project, a large iPhoto library and quite a bit of music.
I have 30G free - mainly because of my completely slap-dash method of 'backing up' - which I realise I'm not actually doing - and also because I have a lot of files copied here from other desktops, laptops and iPods.
The question
Obviously I have a task on my hands to sort this lot out. What would make my life a lot easier would be an application that compares the contents of two folders, and shows me where they differ - this way I am hoping to be able to completely erase great swathes of files without having to comb through them making sure I don't loose an iSight screen grab of my son smashing his Buzz into the screen or some-such. Anyone know of anything that would make my life easier here?
I used to be fairly ordered about where I put files, and how my folders are structured, honest.
Thanks for any help / advice / smacks on the back of the hand...
Flea

Arctic
Well you have a nice project to pass the Winter nights!
Do a search on http://www.macupdate.com using 'duplicate' as the search term. This will provide you with quite a few apps which claim to search for and remove duplicate files. Read and make your choices there.
However, do not trash any file without reviewing it yourself. There are some things a computer cannot do, and recognising emotionally valuable items is one of them.
Have fun.
Regards
TD

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>1. Is there a simple command to copy folder contents and sub-folder contents, or do I need to tell the script to do each sub-folder individually?
There are two common solutions to this.
The first is to use the Finder's 'entire contents of...' command to get a list of everything in the folder, including sub-folders, the second is to make your script recursive - that is, it calls itself several times over.
In the first case it's as simple as:
tell application "Finder"
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end tell
This can have problems, though, especially on very large directories since the Finder is not very efficient at building a list of hundreds or thousands of files.
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set sourceFolder to (choose folder)
processAFolder(sourceFolder)
end run
on processAFolder(theFolder)
tell application "Finder"
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end tell
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>2. I imagine that a better way to manage which files/folders need to be updated is to create a file with a list of the contents, and dates of modification, and compare the new folder list and the old folder list to each-other... ok.. so, um. yeah. that sounds tricky.
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<pre class=command>on processAFile(fileName, sourceDir, destDir)
tell application "Finder"
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set destFileExists to (file fileName of folder destDir exists)
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duplicate file fileName of folder sourceDir to folder destDir
else if destFileExists and not sourceFileExists then
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duplicate file fileName of folder sourceDir to folder destDir
else if (modification date of file fileName of folder destDir) > (modification date of file fileName of folder sourceDir) then
duplicate file fileName of folder sourceDir to folder destDir
end if
end if
end tell
end processAFile</pre>
If you're not planning a two-way synch an even simpler option is to just keep track of the last time the synch was run. Then all you need to do on subsequent runs is ask the Finder for 'every file of folder sourceFolder whose modification date is greater than lastRunDate'.

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On Tue, 25 Jul 2006 20:34:34 +0000 (UTC), "dvhughes"
<[email protected]> wrote:
>I have placed 40 jpg images in a folder on my web site.
How can I let visitors
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>
> I hate to have to make a page & enter all 40 image
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regards
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Just boot into OS9 it has the capability... J/K!
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http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=2004020716455773
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Comparing folder contents

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