Interesting. I just went through the similar problem of combining four computer's worth of archives. In some cases I had near duplicates due to slight doc changes and the like, so I wanted a bit more information. I had a second program do the deletes. (About 9,000 files)

I couldn't go by dates, due to bad file management

Note that the file statement uses the 3 arg version. I had some badly named files such as ' ha'. I wish I could remember the monk name that pointed out the documentation for me.

#!/usr/bin/perl
# allstat.pl
  use warnings;
  use strict;

  use File::Find;
  use File::Basename;
  use Digest::MD5;
 
  my %hash;
  my @temp;
 
  while (my $dir = shift @ARGV) {
    die "Give me a directory to search\n" unless (-d "$dir");
    File::Find::find (\&wanted,"$dir");
  }
exit;
 
sub wanted {
  return unless (-f $_);

  my $md5;
  my $base = File::Basename::basename($File::Find::name, "");
  my $size = -s "$base";
  if ($size >= 10000000) {  # They slowed down the check enough that I
+ skip them
    if ($size >= 99999999) { $size = 99999999; }
    $md5 = 'a'x32;  # At this point I'll just hand check, less than a 
+dozen files
  }
  else {
    $md5 = md5file("$base");
  }
  if ($File::Find::name =~ /\t/) { # Just in case, this screws up our 
+tab delimited file
    warn "'$File::Find::name' has tabs in it\n";
  }
  printf("%32s\t%8d\t%s\t%s\n", $md5, $size, $File::Find::name, $base)
+;
}

sub md5file {
  my ($file) = @_;
  unless (open FILE, "<", "$file" ) {
    warn "Can't open '$file': $!";
    return -1;  #Note we don't want to die just because of one file.
  }
  binmode(FILE);
  my $chksum = Digest::MD5->new->addfile(*FILE)->hexdigest;
  close(FILE);
  return $chksum;
}
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