rmlint: quickly detect and remove lint from your machine

I came across a useful program called rmlint, a very fast GPLv3 licensed non-interactive tool which detects and removes duplicates and other lint from your filesystem, last week and finally had a moment to give it a try.

My initial impressions are quite good. It did everything that it said it could do and quickly freed up a few gigabytes of space in my various miscellaneous storage directories within my /home folder (everyone has at least one of those, right?).

It does things a little differently than other system cleaners in that it doesn’t actually remove the files itself. Instead, it simply generates a shell script which allows you to look over the selected files and tweak things before executing it to finalize the removal process. This of course puts the blame squarely back on your shoulders should you inadvertently delete something you wanted to keep.

It also has a nice colored output as it is working as well as an optional progress bar.

rmlint is able to detect the following:

Duplicate files and directories. Empty/Zero-byte files and directories. Files with broken user and/or group IDs. Broken symbolic links. Non-stripped binaries.

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