[[!comment format=mdwn
 username="http://joey.kitenet.net/"
 nickname="joey"
 subject="comment 6"
 date="2011-12-22T16:39:24Z"
 content="""
My main concern with putting this in git-annex is that finding duplicates necessarily involves storing a list of every key and file in the repository, and git-annex is very carefully built to avoid things that require non-constant memory use, so that it can scale to very big repositories. (The only exception is the `unused` command, and reducing its memory usage is a continuing goal.)

So I would rather come at this from a different angle.. like providing a way to output a list of files and their associated keys, which the user can then use in their own shell pipelines to find duplicate keys:

      git annex find --include '*' --format=\"%f %k\n\" | sort foo --key 2 | uniq --all-repeated --skip-fields=1

(Making that properly handle filenames with spaces is left as an exercise for the reader..)
"""]]