Restructure scan into three phases: walk+stat, hash, update.
The stat pass is folded into the walk workers: each regular file is
lstatted as its directory is read, while the metadata is hot. The
walk builds a scan-wide size census (walked files plus records
outside the scan roots), and unchanged already-hashed files resolve
during the walk without further work.
Only files whose size at least one other file shares are ever read:
a size-unique file cannot be a duplicate, so it is recorded without
hashes (head and tail empty). When a later scan makes its size
shared, the file is hashed then, even if otherwise unchanged. report
excludes unhashed records; trees gives them a never-matching
signature so a tree containing one never compares equal to another.
Hashed records are committed in batched transactions while the hash
phase runs, so an interrupted scan keeps everything hashed so far
and the next run resumes cheaply. The hash phase total is exact,
giving a meaningful ETA.
Memory drops accordingly: the existing-record index holds only path,
size, mtime, and a hashed flag (no hash values); the walk carries one
small record per candidate file; overlapping operands are pruned up
front instead of deduplicating every walked path in a scan-wide set.
Files no bigger than one chunk are hashed with a single read.
Plain make now builds sfdupes (previously the default was all =
check + build); make build remains as an alias, so the Dockerfile
and existing habits keep working. The sfdupes target is phony: go
build's own cache decides what to recompile.
All PATH operands belong to a single scan: every operand seeds the
shared walk worker pool, and each pass (walk, stat, hash, update)
runs exactly once over the whole scan, so pass totals, percentages,
and ETAs are scan-global. The per-operand walk/hash/update cycles and
their stderr operand announcements are gone; duplicate paths from
overlapping operands are deduplicated before stat.
The update pass now commits in batched transactions (10k changes per
batch) instead of one scan-wide transaction: the filesystem is
authoritative and the database is an eventually-consistent reflection
of it, so scan-level atomicity buys nothing, while batches keep the
WAL small and let concurrent reports observe progress.
Phases are strictly sequential again — walk, stat, hash, update per
operand — with parallelism only inside each phase. The walk
enumerates paths with per-directory workers (no lstat of file
entries); the stat pass lstats every collected path with per-file
workers, restoring its exact-total/ETA progress bar and per-file
parallelism inside wide flat directories.
With per-operand walk/hash/update cycles, a multi-operand invocation
(e.g. scan /srv/*) showed pass totals that looked like the whole
run's: an operator watching operand 3 of 14 hash 300k files concluded
the other 20M files were being skipped. Print the operand path and
its position before each cycle.
The walk pass is a single goroutine; on a busy ZFS pool it manages
only a few thousand directory entries per second and takes hours at
~20M files. Respecify it as a worker-pool traversal that reads
directories concurrently and records size/mtime during the walk,
folding away the separate stat pass and halving metadata I/O. Each
PATH operand now commits in its own transaction so an interrupted
scan keeps the operands completed so far.
scan will maintain a persistent database of file signatures
(default /var/lib/sfdupes/db.sqlite, overridable via
SFDUPES_DATABASE) that survives between runs; rescans hash only new
or changed files (mtime/size) and remove records for vanished files,
so scan can be cronned daily. report and trees will read the
database instead of a scan stream.
scan now takes one or more PATH operands (directories or regular
files) via cobra flags instead of the -root flag with its /srv
default; invoking scan with no operand is a usage error and a
nonexistent operand is fatal. Filesystem boundaries are crossed by
default; the new -x/--one-file-system flag (GNU du/rsync convention)
stops the walk at each operand's filesystem, implemented by comparing
lstat device IDs with build-tagged helpers for darwin's int32 Dev.
Verified against a real mounted disk image: default crosses, -x does
not, --one-file-system is identical to -x.
Adds Description (name/purpose/category/license/author), Getting
Started, Rationale, TODO, License, and Author sections; the full
normative specification is preserved under Design. The stale non-goal
about having no git repository or CI is removed, and the Build section
now documents the Makefile targets.