Quickly track down & delete unwanted files

Keeping your hard drive clean can feel like an uphill struggle as it fills up with detritus. Weeding through your files by hand is a painstaking task, and this is where a search-and-delete tool like Czkawka comes riding to the rescue.

Czkawka can do so much more than find duplicated files. It can also track down similar images and videos, music duplicates, broken files (and symlinks), empty files and folders, and more. It’s written in Rust, uses caches to speed up follow-up scans, and is available both via the Linux desktop and as a CLI application.

Getting started

Czkawka can be installed in various ways: via snap, Flatpak (https://flathub.org/apps/details/ com.github.qarmin.czkawka) or you can download the AppImage (https://github.com/qarmin/ czkawka/releases). If you install it through snap, you’ll need to give Czkawka access to all your drives:

$ sudo apt update && sudo snap install czkawka

$ sudo snap connect czkawka:removable-media

If you plan to use Czkawka’s Similar Videos tool, you’ll also need ffmpeg. If you get a warning when you attempt to use the tool, simply install it thus:

$ sudo apt install libgtk-3-dev ffmpeg

You’ll also need to install an ALSA lib package to include music files