[krx]

I am in the process of sorting thru all my old documents - many of which are duplicates or near duplicates. I'm wondering, is there a tool or app that can scan a folder containing multiple (ie, hundreds or thousands) of user-created documents and tell me which ones are duplicates? Also, is there an app that will allow me to compare two or more documents (eg, revisions of the same document) to see where they differ?

Thanks!

[JKT]

I've not used it, but Tidy Up! is one app that can search for duplicate documents. There are probably others. I think there is a CLI tool to compare similar documents but I can't recall what it is ... sorry.

[Chuckit]

The CLI program is diff. It's included with OS X.

[mduell]

Originally Posted by Chuckit 

The CLI program is diff. It's included with OS X.

Yea but if they're Word or some other heinous format, even trivial changes will have huge metadata diffs.

[krx]

Tidy Up! looks like it might solve the duplcates problem. I will give it a try...

What's the CLI program called? Or where can I find it?

Also still looking for a way to compare docs. I have a lot of unfinished writing projects. For example, I might have ten revisions of the same document some of which are almost identical. I'd like to be able to quickly see where they differ (highlighted or something) so I can consolidate them and eliminate superfluous stuff.

I know MS Word has something like this (think it's actually called "Compare Documents") but I'm wondering what else might be available.

Thanks for the input.

[brettcamp]

DiffFrontend.
But as noted above, with formatted text, you get lots of differences, to the point where it may not be useful. Word's file comparison ability is one of the few aspects of that app I miss, but it's certainly not worth using Word for. Hope you find a better text file comparer.

[OreoCookie]

OS X has a nice frontend for that, too, FileMerge (which I love). Unfortunately, as people have pointed out, it's useless for anything but text files.