I had a number of folders on my MacBook. Each of them a full backup from a mobil phone, from different dates. To clean it up, I decided to only keep the elements in each folder, not present in the next folder.

To do this, I started by creating a diff output

diff -q -s folder1/ folder2 > ~/Desktop/diffOutput.txt

This output contained both the uniq files, but also list the identical files.

So to get a list of the identical file names, I used grep and cut, like the following.

grep identical diffoutput.txt | grep -e "folder1/.* and" -o | cut -f2 -d'/' | cut -f1 -d' ' > ~/Desktop/diffParsed.txt

The last thing is to remove the identical files.

cat ~/Desktop/diffParsed.txt | xargs rm