Czkawka

Czkawka is simple, fast and easy to use alternative to Fslint, written in Rust.
It is in very early development, so most of the functions aren't added and doesn't work.
This is my first ever project in Rust so probably a lot of things are written in the most optimal way.

Done

• Rich instruction with examples - CLI(cargo run --bin czkawka_cli)
• Duplicated file finding - CLI
  • Including and excluding directories(absolute paths)
  • Option to remove all except newest, oldest and one oldest or newest
  • Fast(by size) or accurate(by hash) file checking
• Empty folders finding - CLI
  • Advanced empty files finding(finds and remove folders which contains only empty folders)
  • Option to remove all files

TODO

• Comments - a lot of things should be described
• Tests
  • Github CI
  • Unit tests(if available)
• Duplicated file finding - CLI
  • saving results to file
  • support for * when excluding files and folders
• GUI with GTK
• Alternative GUI with Orbtk
• Finding files with debug symbols
• Support for showing only duplicates with specific extension, name(Regex support needed)
• Maybe windows support, but this will need some refactoring in code
• Translation support

Usage and requirements

Rustc 1.46 works fine(not sure about a minimal version)
GTK 3.18 - for GTK backend

For now only Linux(and probably also macOS) is supported

• Install requirements for GTK

apt install -y libgtk-3-dev

• Download source

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

• Run GTK GUI(Still WIP)

cargo run --bin czkawka_gui

• Run alternative Orbtk GUI(Still WIP)

cargo run --bin czkawka_gui_orbtk

• Run CLI

cargo run --bin czkawka_cli

How it works?

Duplicate Finder

The only required parameter for checking duplicates is included folders -i. This parameter validates provided folders - which must have absolute path(without ~ and other similar symbols at the beginning), not contains *(wildcard), be dir(not file or symlink), exists. Later same things are done with excluded folders -e.

Next, this included and excluded folders are optimized due to tree structure of file system:

• Folders which contains another folders are combined(separately for included and excluded) - /home/pulpet and /home/pulpet/a are combined to /home/pulpet
• Included folders which are located inside excluded ones are delete - Included folder /etc/tomcat/ is deleted because excluded folder is /etc/
• Non existed directories are being removed
• Excluded path which are outside include path are deleted - Exclude path /etc/ is removed if included path is /home/ If after optimization there is no include folders, then program ends with non zero value(TODO, this should be handled by returning value).

Next with provided by user minimal size of checked size -s, program checks recursively(TODO should be an option to turn off a recursion) included folders and checks files by sizes and put it files with same sizes to different boxes. Next boxes which contains only one element are removed because files inside are not duplicated.

Next by default also is checked hash to be sure that files with equal size are identical.

Speed

Since Czkawka is written in Rust and aims to be a faster alternative for written in Python - FSlint we need to compare speed of this two tools.

I checked my home directory without any folder exceptions(I removed all directories from FSlint advanced tab) which contained 379359 files and 42445 folders and 50301 duplicated files in 29723 groups which took 450,4 MB.

First run reads file entry and save it to cache so this step is mostly limited by disk performance, and with second run cache helps it so searching is a lot of faster.

App	Executing Time
Fslint (First Run)	140s
Fslint (Second Run)	23s
Czkawka CLI Debug(First Run)	136s
Czkawka CLI Debug(Second Run)	14s
Czkawka CLI Release(First Run)	128s
Czkawka CLI Release(Second Run)	8s

Differences should be more visible when using slower processor or faster disk.

License

Code is distributed under MIT license.