A custom directory/folder merge tool

I am thinking about developing a custome directory/folder merge tool as part of learning functional programming as well as to scratch a very personal itch.

I usually work on three different computers and I tend to accumulate lots of files (text, video, audio) locally and then painstakingly merge them for backup purposes. I am pretty sure I have dupes and unwanted files lying around wasting space. I am moving to a cloud backup solution as a secondary backup source and I want to save as much space as possible by eliminating redundant files.

I have a complex deeply nested directory structure and I want an automated tool that automatically walks down the folder tree and perform the merge. Another problem is that I use a mix of Linux and Windows and many of my files have spaces in the name...

My initial thought was that I need to generate hashes for every file and compare using hashes rather than file names (spaces in folder name as well as contents of files could be different between source and target). 开发者_运维技巧Is RIPEMD-160 a good balance between performance and collision avoidance? or is SHA-1 enough? Is SHA-256/512 overkill?

Which functional programming env comes with a set of ready made libraries for generating these hashes? I am leaning towards OCaml...

Check out the Unison file synchronizer.

I don't use it myself, but I heard quite a few positive reviews. It is a mature software based on some theoretic foundation.

Also, it is written in OCaml.