Ben Kevan’s Blog

Using fslint to take control of your filesystem openSUSE

fslint is a great tool to help you maintain a clean filesystem by finding empty directory, duplicate files, temporary files, and broken sym links (among other things). One of the great features of fslint is it comes with a gui version called fslint-gui (imagine that).

To get, build and install fslint do the following:

wget http://www.pixelbeat.org/fslint/fslint-2.28.tar.gz
sudo rpmbuild -ta fslint-2.28.tar.gz
sudo rpm -Uvh /usr/src/packages/RPMS/noarch/fslint-2.28-1.suse.noarch.rpm

Note:If you use ubuntu you can install with:

sudo apt-get install fslint
or
sudo aptitude install fslint

Now run:

fslint-gui

First I would remove everything in the “Search Path” and add what you want to search no by clicking “Add”.

Note: Here you can choose what type of scan you want to do (recursive etc).

Now it’s as easy as clicking “Find”

Once the scan is completed it’ll fill out the selected section with its findings:

In my “Duplicates” section you can see I have many duplicates

I can either delete them here by clicking on them and choosing “Delete”

Or feel free to use it how you want. You can just take the output save it, and clean manually, or you can use it just to see what you might have out there.

I highly encourage you to check it out, try it on some folders in your home directory, just remember the bigger the directories being scanned, the longer the scan will take. This will also help you better understand your machine, and where you save your data :o)

Tags: filesystems, fslint, opensuse, performance