I'd like to find a tool that will find *similar* files. I have several tools that are great for finding dupes (usually based on file size or CRC) but I'm interested in more of a "fuzzy" search.

Something that searched all folders/files and returned filenames that contained the same 2-3 keywords would probably do the trick. This way I can find folders/files/archives that may be stored on different drives. Perhaps the folders in question are different versions of driver packages or even old zip backups of folders.

This way i can clean out some of the cobwebs of so may years of computing and upgrading HDDs

I'm sure a regular expression could do this, but a tool with a nice GUI would be much easier to work with for a large number of results.

Any suggestions?

This one maybe ?

http://www.wcoyote.org/pubaccess/apps/Hand...e/HFFRSetup.exe

It has a nice GUI and can use regular expressions for searching.

That tool does enable the use of regular expressions. But such an expression is beyond my knowledge of RegEx, if it is even possible...I Googled around for a while to find prior art but had no luck. The only things that came close were python/perl/etc scripts, not regular expressions.

And perhaps what I'm asking for isn't really feasible with RegEx. I didn't see any RegExs that were capable of searching multiple drives and recursive directories to match * keywords.

But surely someone has written a program to do such a thing before...

Search for files (duplicates) equal or similar by percentage: dupkiller

I was looking for something like this a long time. All others (and there are maaany of them) find just duplicates.

The program is still beta and could use some improvement, but it does the job.

GL

Excellent! I'd tried DupKiller before, but that was prior to my "fuzzy" search mission. DupKiller seems to be the king of all dupe file checkers...it does everything. And it is freeware!