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iTunes does a pretty good job keeping your music organized however when you have a ton of music and store it on a NAS for sharing, iTunes gets pissed when it can’t connect and will automatically change your library folder back to home/music.

I had this happen to me three times within the past month and as a result I have three times the music collection (from duplicates being copied without me noticing).  Here is a simple way to get your nice clean library back without having to buy anything.

First you need a copy of fdupes (Linux).  It can identify unique files and tee or > them to a list.  For that you would change to your music directory and run :

fdupes -rf . | tee duplicates


This process may take a while depending on how many files you are comparing. Next you would have to remove them however bash doesn’t like spaces in file names so lets toss this in a little script.

#!/bin/bash
IFS=$'\n'
for x in `cat duplicates`; do rm -v $x; done

And there you have it, no issues with spaces and a nice clean library although beware - you may want to run fdupes twice. Here’s why :

When you issue the -r flag it scans directories recursively.
The -f flag says “keep the first one you find from being piped to the duplicates list”

You should probably run -r and -rf (piped into two individual files) then use vimdiff to compare what you have against what you will potentially be deleting.  I had so much crap in there I just run -rf and deleted.

Happy organizing.

How-To File Management, iTunes, Linux