Hawk Wings » duplicates

iCal Dupe Deleter rips through iCal Duplicates with style

Tim Gaden — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 12:42:30 +0000

John Maisey (it’s John Maisey Day here at Hawk Wings) has also spruced up his applescript for deleting duplicates in iCal.

I’ve just moved to all my calendars to Zimbra’s CalDAV service, and even with every imaginable backup and every care, I ended up with duplicates all over the place.

iCal Dupe Deleter came to the rescue. It is now packaged inside a slick interface that offers more options and control over the deletion process:

It lists the available calendars and offers you the option to test it for duplicates before doing anything drastic.

iCal Dupe Deleter is Leopard-only, although John continues to provide earlier versions of the applescript that work on Tiger along with the new Leopard version on his web site . It is donation-ware.

There are lots of other good scripts there too.

iCal Duplicates Script updated for Leopard

Tim Gaden — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 00:49:21 +0000

John Maisey has updated his AppleScript for deleting duplicates in iCal, so that it works with Leopard.

Syncing and sharing calendars often produces duplicates. Removing them manually is a pain. John’s script makes it easy.

When you run it, it will prompt you to select which of your calendars you want to clean up:

Then is does its business quietly in the background, popping the result when it is done:

One note of warning. It doesn’t offer you a second chance or an option to review the deletions. Once you select the calendar and tell it to clean up, that’s exactly what it does.

So, back up your calendar data first, using the File > Backup iCal menu option.

Delete iCal Duplicates is freeware (donations not refused) is available, along with some other interesting scripts for iCal and Address Book, from John’s web site .

Mail Scripts updated for Leopard

Tim Gaden — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 13:00:43 +0000

Just when I thought I had posted enough for today, Andreas Amann releases a updated, Leopard-friendly version of his most excellent Mail Scripts.

Mail Scripts is a collection of eleven applescripts, bundled up in a user-friendly installer, which will remove duplicate messages in Mail.app, create rules from a selected email faster, archive messages, change SMTP servers on the fly, schedule emails for delivery later and much, much more.

They are now compatible with Leopard, although Andreas adds a note of caution about two of the scripts:

When sending messages other than text/plain (i.e., HTML messages and messages with attachments) using either the “Send all Drafts” or “Schedule Delivery” scripts, Mail might fail to actually send the message and present a dialog telling that the message failed to be sent using the server “null” – re-selecting the correct SMTP server will cause the message to be sent as intended. This seems to be a bug in Mail with the application forgetting the correct SMTP server settings which hopefully will be fixed in a future system upgrade.

Mail Scripts is donation-ware and available from Andreas’ web site . No mail user should be without them.

iCal de-dupe: Kill iCal duplicates

Tim Gaden — Tue, 16 May 2006 12:43:25 +0000

iCal de-dupe is an applescript that deletes duplicate events, often but not always caused by syncing iCal with Palm devices and other PDAs.

It examines each of your calendars in turn, looking for duplicated descriptions, start and end times and dates. If it finds two matching categories within the same calendar, it deletes one of them.

The script worked efficiently and happily on my MacBook Pro, scanning through a fair amount of data in 15 different calendars quickly.

One word of warning: it is not very communicative. There’s no confirmation screen or chance to double-check before deletion.

My first indication that it had finished its work was this dialog in iCal:

What were they? I’ll never know.

An AppleScript posted on macOSXHints late last year does the same thing.

De-dupe looks like it is freeware and is available from the developer’s web site .

Removing duplicate entries in Address Book

Tim Gaden — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 13:23:43 +0000

A recent tip and the comments on it on macOSXHints provide a handy summary of the options for finding and removing duplicate entries in your Address Book.

There are at least three options:

A. Address Book’s built-in ‘Look for Duplicate Entries’ Option

Select the ‘Look for Duplicate Entries…” option from the Card menu. This is less than helpful because it doesn’t give you any information about the cards it will merge. It only offers to do it, without telling you what it’s doing:

B. List duplicates with a Terminal command

The macOSXHints tip contains the text of a useful terminal command:

osascript -e 'tell app "Address Book" to get the name of every person' \ | perl -pe 's/, /\n/g' | sort | uniq -d

Type this text at the Terminal prompt (or cut and paste it, making sure that any ‘curly’ quotes are staight), and you are rewarded with a list of the offending cards (I had two) which you can resolve yourself:

C. Run a ‘Find Duplicates’ AppleScript

In the comments to the tip you will find an AppleScript for removing duplicates. You may wish to adjust the spelling before using it.

It will trawl through your cards and add any duplicates to a new group called “Duplicate Entries” (or possible “Dupelicate Entries”).

Needless to say, you would of course make a backup of Address Book first, using the “Back up Address Book…” option in the File menu.

Hawk Wings » duplicates

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