trickyt57

Vitor, and Deanishse. Thank you both for some really great answers. It is really good to find people who can write intelligently and helpfully, instead of the all too common "Sorry, I don't know how to do that". May you both go to heaven. Deanishe. Thanks for explaining that Alfred can't do things like watching folders and performing actions. At least I am not going to spend days looking for an answer that doesn't exist. Also thanks for the guidance that I will need a script to do this. I have never used scripts, and don't know what they are. I will learn. I have Hazel which can perform loads of useful actions, like naming files, and which is able to use scripts, so that looks like it will be a perfect combination for my solution. So, now, I am off to learning scripting... Vitor: Thanks also for your answers. Although the topic of my question wasn't specifically about duplicate files, but more specifically about an automatic way to delete ALL the files which have a particular reference number in the name, you nevertheless correctly assessed that I have a parallel problem, which is lots of duplicate files. I am going to try all the deletion programs you mentioned. I have in fact tried many in the past, and can't say that I have ever found one which meets my needs. I am coming across two specific problems with deletion programs: 1) Completely identical files in different folders but with slightly different names are not found to be identical, either because the name is different or the creation date is different. 2) Virtually identical files (such as two PDF bank advices for withdrawals), are found to be "identical", when they are not. Let's see. I will report back here on the file duplicate finders you proposed.

My hard drive has tens of thousands of files numbered sequentially, plus some additional identifying text. E.g. I may have a document called "1234568 Bank Statement November 2019.pdf" For historical reasons there are five or six copies of each file with slightly different names, but each contining the unique number. For example in addition to the above file name I may have files with names like: "1234568 Bank Statement November 2019-1.pdf" "1234568 Bank Statement November 2019-2.pdf" "1234568 Bank Statement November 2019-3.pdf" "1234568 Bank Statement November 2019-4.pdf" These duplicate files could be anywhere on the Mac, in random folders, somewhere on my main hard drive, on external drives and cloud drives. Often I find such files have been mis-named. for example the file should have been named "1234568 Bank Statement Jan 2019.pdf". Whenever I find one of these wrongly named files, I would like to manually drag and drop them into a folder called "files to delete", and then have Alfred examine all the filenames in the "files to delete" folder, and then find all files on my hard drive which have the same 7 digit file number, and move them into the folder "files to delete", or to simply delete them. Is this possible with Alfred? If so, could someone walk me through step-by-step? For clarity, I am trying to get away from doing manual searches for the 7 digit number (the actual number is longer and more complex, making it too tedious to type for the thousands of wrongly named files that need deleting).

Vero: I am puzzled by what you wrote: I cannot see any [+], nor anything called kMDItemTextContent, I am running Alfred v. 3.8.1 (961)