Czkawka is written in Rust, simple, fast and easy to use app to remove unnecessary files from your computer.

Features

• Written in memory safe Rust
• Amazingly fast - due using more or less advanced algorithms and multithreading support
• Free, Open Source without ads
• CLI frontend, very fast to automate tasks
• GUI GTK frontend - uses modern GTK 3 and looks similar to FSlint
• Light/Dark theme match the appearance of the system(Linux only)
• Saving results to a file - allows reading entries found by the tool easily
• Rich search option - allows setting absolute included and excluded directories, set of allowed file extensions or excluded items with * wildcard
• Image previews to get quick view at the compared photos
• 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 advanced algorithm
  • Big Files - Finds provided number of the biggest files in given location
  • Empty Files - Looks for empty files across disk
  • Temporary Files - Allows finding temporary files
  • Similar Images - Finds images which are not exactly the same(different resolution, watermarks)
  • Zeroed Files - Find files which are filled with zeros(usually corrupted)
  • Same Music - Search for music with same artist, album etc.
  • Invalid Symbolic Links - Shows symbolic links which points to non-existent files/directories

Instruction

You can find instruction how to use Czkawka here

Requirements

If you are using Windows or Mac binaries, there is no specific requirements.
Same with Appimage on Linux(except having system 18.04+ or similar).
But compiled GUI binaries on Linux or compiling it on your own os require to install this packages:

Ubuntu/Debian

sudo apt install cargo libgtk-3-dev

Fedora/CentOS

sudo yum install gtk3-devel glib2-devel

Windows(Not working yet)

First you need to install Visual C++ components from Visual Studio installer - https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/downloads/

Next install Rust from site https://rustup.rs/

After that the latest GTK 3 runtime must be installed from https://github.com/tschoonj/GTK-for-Windows-Runtime-Environment-Installer/releases

Usage

Precompiled binaries

Precompiled binaries are available here - https://github.com/qarmin/czkawka/releases/.
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 need to have at least GTK 3.22.
It should be installed by default on all the most popular distros.

Windows

czkawka_gui.exe extracted from zip file windows_czkawka_gui.zip needs to have all files inside around, because use them. If you want to move somewhere else exe binary and open it, you need to install GTK 3 runtime from site https://github.com/tschoonj/GTK-for-Windows-Runtime-Environment-Installer/releases

MacOS

For now you need to install manually GTK 3 libraries, because are dynamically loaded from OS(Help needed to use static linking).
To install it you need to type this commands in terminal

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
brew install gtk+3

Next you need to go to place where you downloaded app and add executable bit

chmod +x mac_czkawka_gui

At the end you can open this app

./mac_czkawka_gui

Appimage

Appimage files are available in release page - https://github.com/qarmin/czkawka/releases/

For now looks that there is a bug with this format, because it doesn't allow opening two images/files at once.

Cargo

The easiest method to install Czkawka is to use Cargo command, since it basically compile an entire app, you need to install required packages from Compilation section

cargo install czkawka_gui
cargo install czkawka_cli

You can update package by typing same command.

Snap

Snap also are available, but there is no access to external drives.

sudo snap install czkawka

Snap store entry - https://snapcraft.io/czkawka

Edgy builds are build for every commit, but it may be a little unstable(very rarely, because I'm not pushing untested code).

Flatpak

Maybe someday

Debian/Ubuntu repository and PPA

Tried to set up it, but for now I have problems described in this issue

https://salsa.debian.org/rust-team/debcargo-conf/-/issues/21

AUR - Arch Linux Package (unofficial)

Czkawka is also available in Arch Linux's AUR from which it can be easily downloaded and installed on the system.

yay -Syu czkawka-git

This is unofficial package, so new versions will not be always available.

Devel versions

Artifacts from each commit you can also download here - https://github.com/qarmin/czkawka/actions

Compilation

Requirements

Rust 1.48 - Czkawka aims to support only the latest stable Rust version
GTK 3.22 - only for GTK backend

If you want to compile CLI frontend, then just skip lines which contains gtk word.

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

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

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

Compilation from source

• Download the source

git clone https://github.com/qarmin/czkawka.git
cd czkawka

• Run GTK GUI

cargo run --bin czkawka_gui

For Linux-to-Windows cross-building instruction look at the CI.

• Run CLI(this will print help with a lot of examples)

cargo run --bin czkawka_cli

Benchmarks

Since Czkawka is written in Rust and aims to be a faster alternative to FSlint (written in Python), we need to compare the speed of these tools.

I tested it on SSD Disk 256 GB GoodRam and 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 229868 files which took 203,7 GB and 13708 duplicates 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 Dupeguru crash I checked smaller directory with 217986 files and 41883 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 takes 1,7 GB

App	Scan time
Czkawka 1.4.0	58s
DupeGuru 4.0.4	51s

Similar Images which check 1421 image files which takes 110,1 MB

App	Scan time
Czkawka 1.4.0	25s
DupeGuru 4.0.4	92s

So still is a big room for improvements.

Comparsion other tools

	Czkawka	FSlint	DupeGuru
Language	Rust	Python	Python/Objective C
OS	Linux, Windows, Mac(only CLI)	Linux	Linux, Windows, Mac
Framework	GTK 3 (Gtk-rs)	GTK 2 (PyGTK)	Qt 5 (PyQt)/Cocoa
Ram Usage	Low	Medium	Very High
Duplicate finder	X	X	X
Empty files	X	X
Empty folders	X	X
Temporary files	X	X
Big files	X
Similar images	X		X
Zeroed Files	X
Music duplicates(tags)	X		X
Invalid symlinks	X	X
Installed packages		X
Invalid names		X
Names conflict		X
Bad ID		X
Non stripped binaries		X
Redundant whitespace		X
Multiple languages(po)		X	X
Project Activity	High	Very Low	High

Contributions

Contributions to this repository are welcome.

You can help by creating:

• 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 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, but 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 - https://github.com/nrhodes91/AdMin with MIT license

Program is completely free to use.

"Gratis to uczciwa cena" - "Free is a fair price"

Dotations

If you are using the app, I would appreciate a donation for its further development - https://github.com/sponsors/qarmin.