Cosmetics.

[finddup.git] / finddup.1

diff --git a/finddup.1 b/finddup.1
index 9cc21b4..c86df1e 100644 (file)
--- a/finddup.1
+++ b/finddup.1
@@ -61,26 +61,29 @@ show the real path of the files
 .TP
 \fB-i\fR, \fB--same-inodes-are-different\fR
 files with same inode are considered as different
-.TP
-\fB-m\fR, \fB--md5\fR
-use MD5 hashing
 
 .SH "BUGS"
 
 None known, probably many. Valgrind does not complain though.
 
-The MD5 hashing often hurts more than it helps, hence it is off by
-default. The only case when it should really be useful is when you
-have plenty of different files of same size, which does not happen
-often.
+The current algorithm is dumb, as it does not use any hashing of the
+file content.
+
+Here are the things I tried, which did not help at all: (1) Computing
+md5s on the whole files, which is not satisfactory because files are
+often never read entirely hence the md5s can not be properly computed,
+(2) computing XOR of the first 4, 16 and 256 bytes with rejection as
+soon as one does not match, (3) reading parts of the files of
+increasing sizes so that rejection could be done with a small fraction
+when possible, (4) using mmap instead of open/read.
 
 .SH "WISH LIST"
 
 The format of the output should definitely be improved. Not clear how.
 
 Their could be some fancy option to link two instances of the command
-running on different machines to reduce network disk accesses. Again,
-this may not help much, for the reason given above.
+running on different machines to reduce network disk accesses. This
+may not help much though.
 
 .SH "EXAMPLES"