Dennis, I have a large batch of duplicate qso's in the log (don't ask how they got there) that the deldupes program will not delete. All of them have a commonality in that (1) they are exact dupes - almost. (2) The calls are the same, as are the date/hour/minute, as in two qso's with W5GA, but some of the data is missing. Won't have freq or RST. (3) All of the bad data are missing the seconds in the time column.

Is there a way to do a mass deletion so that the routine compares the calls, and deletes the ones that are missing the seconds if both show the same date, hour and minute? Going through 12k or so QSO's line by line is hard on the fingers :-)

Thanks!

Doug

Aha! I think you found the issue....all the dupes have the wrong operator, as well, which must be why deldupes isn't picking up on it.

My log has 5 different operator calls in it, reflecting calls I've held since 1970. Is there a workaround for this?

Thanks!
Doug

Dennis, just replacing the operator won't work. Over the years, I've had several different calls. The issue is that many of these qso's are correctly logged with an old call, and the bad dupe has my current call. So, if I change the operator I'll end up with an even bigger mess.

Here's what I've done. I've separated my log into 4 different adif files based on operator. In the W5GA adif file, I've found 1280 bad entries based on using "OPERATOR='W5GA' AND QSO_DATE<={^2005-01-01}" as a report filter. This works because as of that date, I was N6AYW. So, any qso showing that early a date and W5GA as the operator is one of the bad dupes.

Is there a way to use that filter string in database commands, combined with a delete command to get rid of the bad entries?

That's got it, Dennis. Many thanks!