codingdirectional: Delete duplicate file with python program

In this article we will start to explore the technique which we will use to delete a duplicate file in our computer folder. The main objective in this chapter is to select a file in one folder and then searches and deletes the file with the same filename as the one which we have selected earlier. We will use back the same program which we have created in the previous chapter to delete the duplicate file in the computer hard drive.

First of all there are not many changes in the main file, I just include another if statement to make sure that a new remove thread instance will only get created if the folder which we want to search for the duplicate file has been selected.

from tkinter import *
from tkinter import filedialog
from Remove import Remove
import os

win = Tk() # 1 Create instance
win.title("Multitas") # 2 Add a title
win.resizable(0, 0) # 3 Disable resizing the GUI
win.configure(background='black') # 4 change background color

# 5 Create a label
aLabel = Label(win, text="Remove duplicate", anchor="center")
aLabel.grid(column=0, row=1)
aLabel.configure(foreground="white")
aLabel.configure(background="black")

# 6 Create a selectFile function to be used by button
def selectFile():

    filename = filedialog.askopenfilename(initialdir="/", title="Select file")
    if(filename != ''):
        filename = filename.split('/')[-1] # this is for the windows separator only
        folder = filedialog.askdirectory() # 7 open a folder then create and start a new remove thread to delete the duplicate file
        if(folder != ''):
            remove = Remove(folder, aLabel, filename)
            remove.start()

# 8 Adding a Button
action = Button(win, text="Open Folder", command=selectFile)
action.grid(column=0, row=0) # 9 Position the button
action.configure(background='brown')
action.configure(foreground='white')

win.mainloop()  # 10 start GUI

Next we will delete the duplicate file if we found one in another folder.

import threading
import os

class Remove(threading.Thread):

   def __init__(self, massage, aLabel, filename):

      threading.Thread.__init__(self)
      self.massage = massage
      self.label = aLabel
      self.filename = filename

   def run(self):
      text_filename = 'The is no duplicate item'
      filepaths = os.listdir(self.massage)
      for filepath in list(filepaths):
         if(filepath == self.filename):
            os.chdir(self.massage)
            os.remove(filepath)
            text_filename = filepath + '  has been removed'

      self.label.config(text=text_filename)

      return

This is just the beginning of this project which we will search within folders to further look for the file with the same name in the next chapter. But we will not stop there because what we really want to achieve is to delete a file with the same content instead of with the same name because the file with the same name might contains different contents which means that it is not a duplicate file after all, but for now lets pretend it is, the most important strategy of writing program is to build up the framework first.

from Planet Python
via read more