P2 : Python

Finding Duplicate Filenames

Objectives

• Use a scripting language
• Use an associative array

Description

In this assignment, you are going to write a small program in Python that uses a type called a dictionary which is basically an associative array.

Specification

The purpose of this program is to produce a table listing all the unique filenames that occur in a set of directories which are entered from the keyboard. For each filename, you need to store a list of all the directories that contain that file.

• The program should read a set of directory names from standard input.
• Use a dictionary to store the name of each file (as the key) and a list of directories in which that file appears.
• The program should write a table containing a line for each file name to standard output. Each name should contain the file name, the number of directories containing that file and a list of the directories where it occurs (in that order).
• The output should be sorted by file name. Can you also sort the paths that are listed for each individual file? How hard would it be to sort by the number of directories that contain the file? Describe the approach you would take in your README file.
• The program will be worth worth more points if you recursively search for files in any subdirectories that you find.

Testing

• testProg
• dirList

the testDirs directory has some directories with sometimes duplicated files which you can run your program on. You can make a symbolic link to testDirs by typing

ln -s ~tcole/teaching/cs354/handouts/p2/testDirs

#!/usr/bin/python

chmod +x filelist.py

./testProg

FYI: testProg is a shell script written in bash. You should be able to tell what it does by reading the file in an editor or listing it to the screen with the cat command.