🐧 I am thinking of writing a tool for deleting files and saving hashes of deleted files, so that other versions of these files can be identified and deleted later

A lot of my files (e.g., photos) exist several times on several hard drives. If I want to delete a file (e.g., blurry image) I have to go to all hard drives and delete it there, otherwise I am wasting disk space. For individual files this is not really a problem, and also not a hige waste of space. But for many files this accumulates.

So my plan is to write an application which maintains a list of files that you don't want anymore. Files would be identified by their hash.

A possible workflow is (I haven't decided for a name yet):

app_name --delete file.jpg 

This will delete the file and add the filename and hash (and maybe size) to a database (sqlite or simple text file) marked as "deleted". Then if I connect a storage device (mounted at /mnt) I would type:

app_name --delete-deleted-files /mnt 

And the program would check for files which match a "deleted" file in the data base.

This last step would probably last rather long on large disks (folders), but one could run this as a maintenance task over night.

Before I start:

• Are there programs like this already? I couldn't find any.
• Does anyone else find this useful?
• Which features and interface would you expect?