If your hard drive is filling up and you don’t know how to clean it up, rmlint can help you. This open Source tool, available on most Linux distributions, will allow you to optimize your disk space in no time.
Unlike other tools of the same type, it stands out for its speed of execution by scanning your disks in the blink of an eye to find all the files that are unnecessarily taking up your precious storage space. In the features menu, rmlint is able to detect:
- THE duplicate files and duplicate directories
- THE unstripped binaries (i.e. with debug symbols)
- THE broken symlinks
- THE empty files and directories
- Files with Invalid user or group ID
But that’s not all since it also offers a paranoia mode for those who want to be 100% sure not to delete important files by mistake. It also offers multiple options to suit your needs and can even limit itself to files newer than a certain date.
For fans of modern file systems like btrfsknow that rmlint manages them like a boss and can take advantage of the latter’s advanced features to save you even more disk space.
To install it under Debian / Ubuntu, a small
sudo apt install rmlintwill do. Then to launch it, simply type the command rmlint followed by the directory you want to scan. For example :
rmlint /home/utilisateur/dossier-bordel
You can add options to refine the analysis, such as -o to specify an output format or
--paranoid
to enable paranoia mode if you don’t trust the hashes returned by the tool and are concerned that non-duplicate files will be deleted.
And there you have it, in a few seconds (or minutes depending on the size of the directory), rmlint will give you a nice report listing all the files that deserve to be discarded. All you have to do is delete them in one go. rm well placed and take advantage of your newly freed gigabytes!
Go to https://rmlint.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ to download rmlint and discover all its options. Your hard drive will thank you!
