czkawka/README.md

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 happenes very rarely because I don't push untested code.

Flatpak

flatpak install flathub com.github.qarmin.czkawka

Czkawka can be found here - https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.github.qarmin.czkawka

Debian/Ubuntu repository and PPA

I tried to set up it, but I'm having problems described in this issue.
Still you can install Czkawka with different methods on this OS.

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

This are unofficial packages, so new versions will not be always available immediately.

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

• 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 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.

Comparsion other tools

	Czkawka	FSlint	DupeGuru
Language	Rust	Python	Python/Obj-C
OS	All	Linux only	All
Framework	GTK 3	PyGTK	Qt 5 (PyQt)/Cocoa
Ram Usage	Low	Medium	Very High
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.