13 KiB
Czkawka is a simple, fast and easy to use app to remove unnecessary files from your computer.
Features
- Written in memory safe Rust
- Amazingly fast - due to using more or less advanced algorithms and multithreading
- Free, Open Source without ads
- Multiplatform - works on Linux, Windows and macOS
- Cache support - second and further scans should be a lot of faster than the first
- CLI frontend - for easy automation
- GUI frontend - uses modern GTK 3 and looks similar to FSlint
- Rich search option - allows setting absolute included and excluded directories, set of allowed file extensions
or excluded items with the
*wildcard - Multiple tools to use:
- Duplicates - Finds duplicates basing on file name, size, hash, first 1 MB of hash
- Empty Folders - Finds empty folders with the help of an advanced algorithm
- Big Files - Finds the provided number of the biggest files in given location
- Empty Files - Looks for empty files across the drive
- Temporary Files - Finds temporary files
- Similar Images - Finds images which are not exactly the same (different resolution, watermarks)
- Zeroed Files - Finds files which are filled with zeros (usually corrupted)
- Same Music - Searches for music with same artist, album etc.
- Invalid Symbolic Links - Shows symbolic links which points to non-existent files/directories
- Broken Files - Finds files with an invalid extension or that are corrupted
How do I use it?
You can find an instruction on how to use Czkawka here.
Requirements
If you are using Windows or Mac binaries, there is no specific requirements.
Same with Appimage, Flatpak and Snap on Linux (except having system 18.04+ or similar).
Although, compiled GUI binaries on Linux or compiling it on your own OS requires you to install these packages:
Ubuntu/Debian
sudo apt install libgtk-3-dev
Fedora/CentOS
sudo yum install gtk3-devel glib2-devel
Void Linux (CLI only)
sudo xbps-install gcc pkg-config alsa-lib-devel
Installation
Precompiled binaries
Ready-to-go executables are available here.
If the app does not run when clicking at a launcher, run it through a terminal.
You don't need to have any additional libraries for CLI Czkawka.
GUI Requirements
Linux
For Czkawka GUI you are required to have at least GTK 3.22 and also Alsa installed (for finding broken music
files). It should be installed by default on all the most popular distros.
Windows
The czkawka_gui.exe which is extracted from the windows_czkawka_gui.zip zip file needs to be in the same
file as the rest. If you want to move and open the executable somewhere else, you need to install the GTK 3
runtime from here.
macOS
Currently you need to manually install GTK 3 libraries, because they are dynamically loaded from the OS (we need
help in using static linking). Installation in the terminal:
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
brew install gtk+3
After that, go to the location where you installed this and add the executable permission.
chmod +x mac_czkawka_gui
Execute in the same folder with:
./mac_czkawka_gui
Appimage
Appimage files are available in release page - GitHub releases There is a problem with this currently, as it doesn't allow you to open two images/files at once.
Cargo
The easiest method to install Czkawka is using the cargo command. For compiling it, you need to get all the
requirements from the compilation section.
cargo install czkawka_gui
cargo install czkawka_cli
You can update the package with the same command.
Snap
sudo snap install czkawka
By default, Snap can only access to the files in your home directory. You have to allow czkawka to access to all the drives:
sudo snap connect czkawka:removable-media
The Snap store entry can be found here.
Fresh builds are available in edge branch, but they may be a little unstable, although that happens very rarely because I don't push untested code.
Flatpak
flatpak install flathub com.github.qarmin.czkawka
Flathub page with Czkawka can be found here
Unofficial packages, which may not always provide the latest version of Czkawka.
PPA - Debian/Ubuntu (unofficial)
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:xtradeb/apps
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install czkawka
AUR - Arch Linux Package (unofficial)
Czkawka is also available in Arch Linux's AUR from which it can be easily installed.
yay -Syu czkawka-git
or
yay -Syu czkawka-gui-bin
yay -Syu czkawka-cli-bin
Package info's - https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/?O=0&SeB=nd&K=czkawka&outdated=&SB=n&SO=a&PP=50&do_Search=Go
Docker image (unofficial)
Czkawka docker image is available here
Development versions
Artifacts from each commit can be downloaded here
Compilation
The compilation section is generally not recommended, because you have multiple better sources of this app than compiling it yourself.
Requirements
| Program | Min | What for |
|---|---|---|
| Rust | 1.48 | Czkawka aims to support only the latest stable Rust version |
| GTK | 3.22 | Only for the GTK backend |
If you only want the terminal version without a GUI, just skip all lines about gtk.
Debian / Ubuntu
sudo apt install -y curl # Needed by Rust update tool
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh # Download the latest stable Rust
sudo apt install -y libgtk-3-dev libasound2-dev
Fedora / CentOS / Rocky Linux
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh # Download the latest stable Rust
sudo yum install gtk3-devel glib2-devel alsa-lib-devel
macOS
You need to install Homebrew and GTK Libraries
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
brew install rust gtk+3
Windows
Will be available in the future
Compilation from source
- Download the source
git clone https://github.com/qarmin/czkawka.git
cd czkawka
- Compile and run GTK GUI
cargo run --bin czkawka_gui
For Linux-to-Windows cross-building instruction look at the CI.
- Compile and run CLI (this will print help with a lot of examples)
cargo run --bin czkawka_cli
Additional features
For now, finding broken audio files is temporary disabled by default, because it crash when not found audio libraries on computer.
I'm waiting for ability to disable audio playback feature, so after that I will be able to re-enable by default this feature (https://github.com/RustAudio/rodio/issues/349)
To enable checking for broken audio files, just add at the end --all-features
cargo run --all-features --bin czkawka_cli -- broken -d /home/rafal/ -f "results.txt"
Benchmarks
Since Czkawka is written in Rust and it aims to be a faster alternative to FSlint (which is written in Python), we need to compare the speed of these tools.
I tested it on a 256 GB SSD and a i7-4770 CPU.
I prepared a directory and performed a test without any folder exceptions (I removed all directories from FSlint and Czkawka from other tabs than Include Directory) which contained 229 868 files, took 203.7 GB and had 13 708 duplicate files in 9117 groups which took 7.90 GB.
Minimum file size to check I set to 1 KB on all programs.
| App | Executing Time |
|---|---|
| FSlint 2.4.7 (Second Run) | 86s |
| Czkawka 1.4.0 (Second Run) | 12s |
| DupeGuru 4.0.4 (Second Run) | 28s |
I used Mprof for checking memory usage FSlint and DupeGuru, for Czkawka I used Heaptrack. To not get a crash from DupeGuru I checked a smaller directory with 217 986 files and 41 883 folders.
| App | Idle Ram | Max Operational Ram Usage | Stabilized after search |
|---|---|---|---|
| FSlint 2.4.7 | 62 MB | 84 MB | 84 MB |
| Czkawka 1.4.0 | 9 MB | 66 MB | 32 MB |
| DupeGuru 4.0.4 | 80 MB | 210 MB | 155 MB |
Similar images which check 332 files which took 1.7 GB
| App | Scan time |
|---|---|
| Czkawka 1.4.0 | 58s |
| DupeGuru 4.0.4 | 51s |
Similar images which check 1421 image files which took 110.1 MB
| App | Scan time |
|---|---|
| Czkawka 1.4.0 | 25s |
| DupeGuru 4.0.4 | 92s |
So there is still is a lot of room for improvements.
Comparison to other tools
| Czkawka | FSlint | DupeGuru | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Language | Rust | Python | Python/Obj-C |
| OS | All | Linux only | All |
| Framework | GTK 3 | PyGTK | Qt 5 (PyQt)/Cocoa |
| Duplicate finder | • | • | • |
| Empty files | • | • | |
| Empty folders | • | • | |
| Temporary files | • | • | |
| Big files | • | ||
| Similar images | • | • | |
| Zeroed Files | • | ||
| Music duplicates(tags) | • | • | |
| Invalid symlinks | • | • | |
| Broken Files | • | ||
| Installed packages | • | ||
| Invalid names | • | ||
| Names conflict | • | ||
| Bad ID | • | ||
| Non stripped binaries | • | ||
| Redundant whitespace | • | ||
| Multiple languages(po) | • | • | |
| Cache support | • | • | |
| Project Activity | High | Very Low | High |
Contributions
Contributions to this repository are welcome.
You can help by creating a:
- Bug report - memory leaks, unexpected behavior, crashes
- Feature proposals - proposal to change/add/delete some features
- Pull Requests - implementing a new feature yourself or fixing bugs, but you have to pay attention to code quality. If the change is bigger, then it's a good idea to open a new issue to discuss changes.
- Documentation - There is an instruction which you can improve.
The code should be clean and well formatted (Clippy and fmt are required in each PR).
Name
Czkawka is a Polish word which means hiccup.
I chose this name because I wanted to hear people speaking other languages pronounce it.
This name is not as bad as it seems, because I was also thinking about using words like żółć, gżegżółka or żołądź, but I gave up on these ideas because they contained Polish characters, which would cause difficulty in searching for the project.
At the beginning of the program creation, if the response concerning the name was unanimously negative, I prepared myself for a possible change of the name of the program, and the opinions were extremely mixed.
License
Code is distributed under MIT license.
Icon is created by jannuary and licensed CC-BY-4.0.
Windows dark theme is used from AdMin repo with MIT license.
The program is completely free to use.
"Gratis to uczciwa cena" - "Free is a fair price"
Donations
If you are using the app, I would appreciate a donation for its further development, which can be done here.