Skip to content

duplicates: improve the checksum option docs #6913

New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

Sign up for GitHub

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Open
cycsmail wants to merge 1 commit into
base: master
Choose a base branch
from
+32 −7
Open

duplicates: improve the checksum option docs #6913

Show file tree
Hide file tree
Changes from all commits
Commits
Show all changes
1 commit
Select commit
File filter

Filter by extension

Filter by extension
Conversations
Failed to load comments.
Loading
Jump to
Jump to file
Failed to load files.
Loading
Diff view
Diff view
10 changes: 7 additions & 3 deletions docs/changelog.rst
View file
Open in desktop
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -55,9 +55,13 @@ Bug fixes
For plugin developers
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

..
Other changes
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Other changes
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

- :doc:`plugins/duplicates`: Improve the documentation of the ``checksum``
option: explain how the external command is run, remove the broken ``md5sum
{file}`` example and show how to use such commands through a wrapper script.
:bug:`3979`

2.13.1 (July 29, 2026)
----------------------
Expand Down
29 changes: 25 additions & 4 deletions docs/plugins/duplicates.rst
View file
Open in desktop
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -47,8 +47,14 @@ file. The available options mirror the command-line options:
overrides the ``keys`` option the first time it is run; however, because it
caches the resulting checksum as ``flexattrs`` in the database, you can use
``--key=name_of_the_checksumming_program --key=any_other_keys`` (or set the
``keys`` configuration option) the second time around. Default: ``ffmpeg -i
{file} -f crc -``.
``keys`` configuration option) the second time around. The command is not run
through a shell: it is split into arguments (respecting shell-like quoting)
and ``{file}`` is then replaced with the item's path within each argument, so
paths containing spaces need no extra quoting, but shell features such as
pipes or redirection cannot be used. The command's entire output is used as
the checksum, so it must not contain anything that differs between copies of
the same file, such as the file's path. Default: ``ffmpeg -i {file} -f crc
-``.
- **copy**: A destination base directory into which to copy matched items.
Default: none (disabled).
- **count**: Print a count of duplicate tracks or albums in the format
Expand Down Expand Up @@ -126,13 +132,28 @@ Get tracks with the same title, artist, and album:

beet duplicates -k title -k albumartist -k album

Compute Adler CRC32 or MD5 checksums, storing them as flexattrs, and report back
Compute Adler CRC32 checksums, storing them as flexattrs, and report back
duplicates based on those values:

::

beet dup -C 'ffmpeg -i {file} -f crc -'
beet dup -C 'md5sum {file}'

Note that ``beet dup -C 'md5sum {file}'`` would not work: the command's entire
output is used as the checksum, and ``md5sum`` prints the file's path after the
hash, so copies of the same file at different paths would never match. Instead,
wrap the command in a script that prints only the hash:

::

#!/bin/sh
md5sum "$1" | awk '{print $1}'

and use that script as the checksum command:

::

beet dup -C 'myscript {file}'

Copy highly danceable items to ``party`` directory:

Expand Down
Loading