Install jdupes with Homebrew, apk, apt, dnf, MacPorts, Nix, scoop, zypper

Project links

• Homepage
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• jdupes

Project history

Jody Bruchon's project began as performance and behavior patches for Adrian Lopez's fdupes. In the author-written history, Bruchon says the first change that led to jdupes was made during the last week of December 2014 after fdupes progress output proved slow over SSH.

The fork was first named fdupes-jody after the fdupes maintainer did not merge the patch set. Bruchon continued optimizing and adding features in 2015, including Windows and Mac OS X portability, hard-link support, size exclusion, sorting changes, Btrfs block-level dedupe support, and many performance improvements.

On December 23, 2015, fdupes-jody 2.2 was renamed to jdupes 1.0. In October 2023, Bruchon announced that jdupes, libjodycode, and his other software projects were migrating to Codeberg.

Adoption history

The author history says jdupes spread into many Linux distributions, and the batch input records packages in Alpine, Homebrew, Debian, Fedora, MacPorts, Nix, Scoop, Ubuntu, and openSUSE. That breadth fits its role as a command-line filesystem utility with conservative defaults but powerful destructive options for expert use.

How it is used

jdupes scans one or more directories for byte-identical files and can print match sets, recurse through trees, delete duplicates, create hard links or symlinks, summarize duplicates, emit JSON, use a hash database, and perform copy-on-write deduplication where supported. The README explicitly warns that similar-file matching is outside its scope.

Why package nerds care

jdupes matters to package nerds because it is a classic fork story with measurable command-line utility: a small C tool outgrew its parent by focusing on speed, safety checks, portability, and filesystem-specific actions. It is also a reminder that package availability can make a fork the practical default even when the original tool remains known.

Timeline

• 1999: The author history describes fdupes as present since at least this year.
• 2014: Initial fdupes patch work began during the last week of December.
• 2015: fdupes-jody accumulated portability, performance, and deduplication features.
• 2015: fdupes-jody 2.2 was renamed to jdupes 1.0 on December 23.
• 2023: The project migration to Codeberg was announced.

Related projects

• Related projects include fdupes, the parent project; dupd and fclones, which the author discusses as competing duplicate finders; and libjodycode, a shared library factored from code that had been reused across jdupes and other Bruchon projects.

Sources

• https://codeberg.org/jbruchon/jdupes
• https://codeberg.org/jbruchon/jdupes/src/branch/master/README.md
• https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/jdupes
• https://www.jdupes.com/2023/08/23/the-history-of-jdupes-why-its-called-that-and-where-it-came-from/
• https://www.jdupes.com/2023/10/05/news-github-is-out-codeberg-is-in/