rmlint finds space waste and other broken things on your filesystem and offers to remove it. It is able to find:

Duplicate files & directories. Nonstripped Binaries Broken symlinks.

Empty files. Recursive empty directories. Files with broken user or group id.

Key Features:

Extremely fast. Flexible and easy commandline options. Choice of several hashes for hash-based duplicate detection

Option for exact byte-by-byte comparison (only slightly slower). Numerous output options. Option to store time of last run; next time will only scan new files.

Many options for original selection / prioritisation. Can handle very large file sets (millions of files). Colorful progressbar. (😃)

---

User manual

Although rmlint is easy to use, you might want to read these chapters first. They show you the basic principles and most of the advanced options:

• Installation
  • Dependencies
  • Compilation
  • Troubleshooting
• Gentle Guide to rmlint
  • Beginner Examples
  • Filtering input files
  • Outputs & Formatters
  • Paranoia mode
  • Original detection / selection
  • Finding duplicate directories
  • Replaying results
  • Miscellaneous options
  • Scripting
• Graphical user interface
  • Installation
  • Usage
  • Developers
• Cautions (or why it’s hard to write a dupefinder)
  • Good Practice when Deleting Duplicates
  • Attributes of a Robust Duplicate Finder
• Frequently Asked Questions
  • rmlint finds more/less dupes than tool X!
  • Can you implement feature X?
  • I forgot to add some options before running on a large dataset. Do I need to re-run it?
  • I have a very large number of files and I run out of memory and patience.

If you have usage questions or find weird behaviour, you can also try to reach us via IRC in #rmlint on irc.freenode.net.

Since version 2.4.0 we also feature an optional graphical user interface:

Informative reference

These chapters are informative and are not essential for the average user. People that want to extend rmlint might want to read this though:

• Developer’s Guide
• Translating rmlint
• Benchmarks
• Online-manpage of rmlint(1)

The Changelog is also updated with new and futures features, fixes and overall changes.

Authors

rmlint was and is written by:

Christopher Pahl	https://github.com/sahib	2010-2019
Daniel Thomas	https://github.com/SeeSpotRun	2014-2019
Cebtenzzre	https://github.com/Cebtenzzre	2021-2023

Additional thanks to:

vvs- (Scalability testing) Attila Toth

All sane bugreporters (there are not many)

All packagers, porters and patchers.

License

rmlint is licensed under the terms of GPLv3.