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Remove dropbox conflicted files on Mac or Linux using Terminal

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I like Dropbox. I use it all the time to share files across machines and work on group projects. However, I don’t like how Dropbox duplicates files as and saves them as conflicted copies. It’s not something that I need or use. I just delete those “conflicted” files. 99.99% of the time the conflicted files are not conflicted, Dropbox is just over zealous. Also I use .git to handle my file pushes so I know right away if files have changed. I don’t need Dropbox doing this for me.

I work on a Mac so here is something I run in my terminal to quickly remove those annoying conflicted files.

$ cd dropbox
$ find . -type f -name "* conflicted *" -exec rm -f {} \;

By Jonathan Whiting

I enjoy sharing what I am learning and hopefully it's of interest and help to you. I live in Canada with my wife. Follow me on Twitter.

9 replies on “Remove dropbox conflicted files on Mac or Linux using Terminal”

Cannot thank you enough!
I copied something like 15,000 files when I was reformatting my computer to an external, and then placed them back in to my dropbox folder. I didn’t want to wait ages for it to synch via wifi, but instead ended up with conflicted copies of everything. Your code deletes it instantly, so thank you!

Hey, on the Mac (and on some UNIX systems), the find command can take a -delete option. So the easiest way to do this is:

find . -type f -name “* conflicted *” -print
(that will list out all the conflicted files), then

find . -type f -name “* conflicted *” -delete

Thanks, very helpful when I am home and can run Linux/Ubuntu; tried it today in my Win XP terminal and did not work. Is there a version of the script that would work in Win XP ?

Hi Alvin, I’m not as familiar with the windows console as I work mostly on the mac. If you find the answer, could you post it back here?

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