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Clone Cleaner 2.40- by Dr. Dirk Terrell
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I still remember the day I first got my hands on an old IBM PC that had a hard drive. After messing around with cassette tape storage on my Commodore VIC-20, a floppy disk drive was an essential item when I upgraded to a Commodore 64. When I saw this PC with a 10 MEGABYTE hard drive, I drooled. Fast-forward about 15 years, and I am walking through a large discount store looking at 11 gigabyte drives. My entire Pentium Pro machine cost less than that 10 megabyte hard drive did back in 1983. We definitely have it good these days.

But with all this room, we still find ourselves running out of disk space. As the saying goes, you can never have enough. Part of the problem is that often there are multiple copies of the same file scattered across your disks. Edward March's Clone Cleaner solves that problem very nicely.

Clone Cleaner is a sophisticated program that scans your hard drives looking for multiple copies of files. It is rich in features, and enables you to look for duplicate files that have:

Installation

The program comes with a Rexx script to create Desktop objects for the executable and the documentation. All you have to do is unzip the archive and run the install script.

Finding Duplicate Files

The main window (GIF 8.8K) of Clone Cleaner is pretty configurable. You can place the toolbar on any side of the window or have it free-floating (GIF, 10K). The first thing you'll want to do is bring up the settings notebook (GIF, 11.3K) to define where and how to look for duplicate files. You can specify search criteria such as masks (e.g., *.dll), attributes (Read Only, Archive, Hidden, etc.), directories, and dates and times. You can also set exclude masks and directories. You can even have Clone Cleaner look inside zip files for duplicates.

Once you have the settings the way you want them, you put Clone Cleaner in action by clicking on the Scan button. Depending on how many files you are checking and the checking options, this may take some time. Once the scan is complete, you are given a list of files (GIF, 16K) that might be duplicates.

Selecting a file and clicking on the Info button brings up a little window (GIF, 7.1K) that gives you such vital information as size, attributes, timestamps, and whether or not the file is referenced in the PATH, LIBPATH, DPATH or HELP environment variables, or otherwise within your CONFIG.SYS file. If you decide that the file should be deleted, just click on the delete button.

A very nice feature of the program is the ability to take the results of the search and create a Rexx file (GIF, 11K) that does some processing on the files such as deleting, moving, or archiving them. You can perform this operation on all files, or only the ones that you have tagged. The dialog for this function has all the special codes nicely documented so you don't have to switch over to an online help file when using it.

You can delete files one at a time as mentioned above, or you can delete them en masse. You can delete all tagged files or all untagged files and you are always prompted before deleting files. If you have tagged multiple files, you can confirm each deletion or have the program delete all of them without confirmation.

Clone Cleaner also allows you to copy the results of a search to the clipboard or to save the results to a file. You can even restore the results of a search which allows you to avoid having to re-scan your drives.

Conclusion

Clone Cleaner is a nice utility to have around. Sure, it serves a limited purpose, but it does its job very well. It is distributed as shareware and has a few limitations imposed on its functionality to encourage registration, but the US$19.95 registration fee is reasonable. Grab this program and give it a try. You might be surprised at just how much disk space you're wasting.

* * *

Clone Cleaner 2.40

by Edward March
download from the OS/2 Supersite (ZIP, 822K)
Registration: US$19.95

Dr. Dirk Terrell is an astronomer at the University of Florida specializing in interacting binary stars. His hobbies include cave diving, martial arts, painting and writing OS/2 software such as HTML Wizard.


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