MacOS – How to find duplicate folder names and resolve naming conflicts in OS X

foldersitunesmacosnasrename

I have my music collect on my NAS and would like to copy it to my laptop. When I try to copy the music folder and paste it to a new location on my laptop I get messages that OS X can't paste the folder to the new location because a folder with the same name already exists.

For example, let's say I have the following two folders:

/Music/311/horrible album

/Music/311/Horrible Album

As it stands right now, both folders are sitting on my NAS. When I try to copy the Music folder over to my laptop, I get a message that OS X won't allow this because of the above folders have the same name.

Each time I try this whole copy/paste thing I'm getting the same error message, find the conflict, move the files from one folder to the other, delete the original folder and then try again only to have another conflict.

So…I'm trying to find an application or script that could scan my iTunes music folder and see where I have these conflicts so I can actively go in and fix them so that the copy/paste thing will work without errors. I'm a bit of a newbie with Terminal but willing to give it a try.

System specs:

Latest OSX 10.10.4
Lastest iTunes 12.2.1.16
Old Macbook Pro
Synology DS213J

Best Answer

You can do this in bash to identify which files and folders are problematic:

find /path/to/remote/library | tr A-Z a-z | sort | uniq -d

This will output all lower case files and folders that have a duplicate with upper case letters.

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MacOS – Move ‘Pictures’, ‘Documents’, ‘Movies’ etc folders

Art,

Do you have this working successfully?

Have you tried hiding the folders using something like:

chflags hidden ~/Documents

Then creating a link to it such as (in Terminal):

cd ~
mkdir stuff
cd stuff
ln -s ~/Documents

I believe that this will hide the ~/Documents folder from the Finder but it will still be there so anything writing to it will work OK. In addition you will see the link in ~/stuff...

How to get iTunes Library to stay pointed to the NAS

I can answer the second part of your question. Since you just updated the MacBook's iTunes settings to point to the NAS, it's iTunes library file still resides on the MacBook. This is a .itl file in your ~/Music/iTunes folder.

iTunes relies on this database to tell it what's in the media folder. If you add stuff to the media folder without adding it through iTunes (i.e. just dropping files in Finder, or using another copy of iTunes on another machine) then that .itl database does not get updated.

So when you add files through iTunes on your Mac Pro, it updates the .itl database on your Mac Pro, but not your MacBook, so the MB can't see those files. If you add anything through iTunes on the MB, the Mac Pro database won't have it, since the copy of iTunes that connects to that database did not process the files.

I have a similar setup to what you're doing: iTunes media on an external drive connected to my iMac, and a MacBook which I use ONLY Home Sharing on.

You might get the idea to move one .itl file to the NAS and open it in iTunes on both machines, and this will work, but you can/should never have it open in both at the same time. That .itl file is really just an SQLite database, and they don't allow simultaneous access, so I've never even attempted this.

With respect to your first question, check ~/Music/iTunes and see if there are any old library (.itl) files. It's most likely that iTunes is opening an old copy or a backup of the database. If you duplicated the database or started a new one before moving your media, this might be the cause.

Start iTunes and make sure the media folder is set correctly or make some other change in iTunes. Now go to ~/Music/iTunes and look for the .itl file that has most recently been modified. Move all the others out of the folder.

Quit iTunes and restart it while holding the Option/Alt key. This will bring up a dialog that lets you select which database to use. Select the .itl file you left alone and it will continue using that as the default library.

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