Ubuntu Manpage: rmlint - find duplicate files and other space waste efficiently

NAME

       rmlint - find duplicate files and other space waste efficiently

FIND DUPLICATE FILES AND OTHER SPACE WASTE EFFICIENTLY

SYNOPSIS
rmlint [TARGET_DIR_OR_FILES ...] [//] [TAGGED_TARGET_DIR_OR_FILES ...] [-] [OPTIONS]

DESCRIPTION
rmlint finds space waste and other broken things on your filesystem.

Types of waste include:

• Duplicate files and directories.

• Nonstripped Binaries (Binaries with debug symbols).

• Broken links.

• Empty files and directories.

• Files with broken user or group id.

rmlint will not delete any files. It does however produce executable output (for example a shell script)
to help you delete the files if you want to.

In order to find the lint, rmlint is given one or more directories to traverse. If no directories or
files were given, the current working directory is assumed. By default, rmlint will ignore hidden files
and will not follow symlinks (see traversal options below). rmlint will first find "other lint" and then
search the remaining files for duplicates.

Duplicate sets will be displayed as an original and one or more duplicates. You can set criteria for how
rmlint chooses using the -S option (by default it chooses the first-named path on the command line, or if
that is equal then the oldest file based on mtime). You can also specify that certain paths only contain
originals by naming the path after the special path separator //.

Examples are given at the end of this manual.

OPTIONS
General Options
-T --types="list" (default: defaults)
Configure the types of lint rmlint will look for. The list string is a comma-separated list of
lint types or lint groups (other separators like semicolon or space also work).

One of the following groups can be specified at the beginning of the list:

• all: Enables all lint types.

• defaults: Enables all lint types, but nonstripped.

• minimal: defaults minus emptyfiles and emptydirs.

• minimaldirs: defaults minus emptyfiles, emptydirs and duplicates, but with duplicatedirs.

• none: Disable all lint types [default].

Any of the following lint types can be added individually, or deselected by prefixing with a -:

• badids, bi: Find bad UID, GID or files with both.

• badlinks, bl: Find bad symlinks pointing nowhere.

• emptydirs, ed: Find empty directories.

• emptyfiles, ef: Find empty files.

• nonstripped, ns: Find nonstripped binaries.

• duplicates, df: Find duplicate files.

• duplicatedirs, dd: Find duplicate directories.

WARNING: It is good practice to enclose the description in quotes. In obscure cases argument
parsing might fail in weird ways.

-o --output=spec / -O --add-output=spec (default: -o sh:rmlint.sh -o pretty:stdout -o summary:stdout)
Configure the way rmlint outputs its results. A spec is in the form format:file or just format. A
file might either be an arbitrary path or stdout or stderr. If file is omitted, stdout is
assumed.

If -o is specified, rmlint's defaults are overwritten. With --O the defaults are preserved.
Either -o or -O may be specified multiple times to get multiple outputs, including multiple
outputs of the same format.

For a list of formatters and their options, refer to the Formatters section below.

-c --config=spec[=value] (default: none)
Configure a format. This option can be used to fine-tune the behaviour of the existing formatters.
See the Formatters section for details on the available keys.

If the value is omitted it is set to a true value.

-z --perms[=[rwx]] (default: no check)
Only look into file if it is readable, writable or executable by the current user. Which one of
the can be given as argument as one of "rwx".

If no argument is given, "rw" is assumed. Note that r does basically nothing user-visible since
rmlint will ignore unreadable files anyways. It's just there for the sake of completeness.

By default this check is not done.

-a --algorithm=name (default: blake2b)
Choose the algorithm to use for finding duplicate files. The algorithm can be either paranoid
(byte-by-byte file comparison) or use one of several file hash algorithms to identify duplicates.
The following well-known algorithms are available:

spooky, city, murmur, xxhash, md5, sha1, sha256, sha512, farmhash, sha3, sha3-256, sha3-384,
sha3-512, blake2s, blake2b, blake2sp, blake2bp.

There are also some compound variations of the above functions:

• bastard: 256bit, combining city, and murmur.

• city256, city512, murmur256, murmur512: Use multiple 128-bit hashes with different seeds.

• spooky32, spooky64: Faster version of spooky with less bits.

-p --paranoid / -P --less-paranoid (default)
Increase or decrease the paranoia of rmlint's duplicate algorithm. Use -pp if you want
byte-by-byte comparison without any hashing.

• -p is equivalent to --algorithm=sha512

• -pp is equivalent to --algorithm=paranoid

• -P is equivalent to --algorithm bastard

• -PP is equivalent to --algorithm spooky

-v --loud / -V --quiet
Increase or decrease the verbosity. You can pass these options several times. This only affects
rmlint's logging on stderr, but not the outputs defined with -o. Passing either option more than
three times has no effect.

-g --progress / -G --no-progress (default)
Convenience shortcut for -o progressbar -o summary -o sh:rmlint.sh -VVV.

Note: This flag clears all previous outputs. Specify any additional outputs after this flag!

-D --merge-directories (default: disabled)
Makes rmlint use a special mode where all found duplicates are collected and checked if whole
directory trees are duplicates. Use with caution: You always should make sure that the
investigated directory is not modified during rmlint's or its removal scripts run.

IMPORTANT: Definition of equal: Two directories are considered equal by rmlint if they contain the
exact same data, no matter how the files containing the data are named. Imagine that rmlint
creates a long, sorted stream out of the data found in the directory and compares this in a magic
way. This means that the layout of the directory is not considered to be important by rmlint. This
might be surprising to some users, but remember that rmlint generally cares only about content,
not about any other metadata or layout.

Output is deferred until all duplicates were found. Duplicate directories are printed first,
followed by any remaining duplicate files.

--rank-by applies for directories too, but 'p' or 'P' (path index) has no defined (i.e. useful)
meaning. Sorting takes only place when the number of preferred files in the directory differs.

NOTES:

• This option enables --partial-hidden and -@ (--see-symlinks) for convenience. If this is not
desired, you should change this after specifying -D.

• This feature might not deliver perfect result in corner cases, but should never report false
positives.

• This feature might add some runtime for large datasets.

• When using this option, you will not be able to use the -c sh:clone option. Use -c sh:link as a
good alternative.

-j --honour-dir-layout (default: disabled)
Only recognize directories as duplicates that have the same path layout. In other words: All
duplicates that build the duplicate directory must have the same path from the root of the
directory. This flag has no effect without --merge-directories.

-y --sort-by=order (default: none)
During output, sort the found duplicate groups by criteria described by order. order is a string
that may consist of one or more of the following letters:

• s: Sort by size of group.

• a: Sort alphabetically by the basename of the original.

• m: Sort by mtime of the original.

• p: Sort by path-index of the original.

• o: Sort by natural found order (might be different on each run).

• n: Sort by number of files in the group.

The letter may also be written uppercase (similar to -S / --rank-by) to reverse the sorting. Note
that rmlint has to hold back all results to the end of the run before sorting and printing.

--gui Start the optional graphical frontend to rmlint called Shredder.

This will only work when Shredder and its dependencies were installed. See also:
http://rmlint.readthedocs.org/en/latest/gui.html

The gui has its own set of options, see --gui --help for a list. These should be placed at the
end, ie rmlint --gui [options] when calling it from commandline.

--hash [paths...]
Make rmlint work as a multi-threaded file hash utility, similar to the popular md5sum or sha1sum
utilities, but faster and with more algorithms. A set of paths given on the commandline or from
stdin is hashed using one of the available hash algorithms. Use rmlint --hash -h to see options.

--equal [paths...]
Check if the paths given on the commandline all have equal content. If all paths are equal and no
other error happened, rmlint will exit with an exit code 0. Otherwise it will exit with a nonzero
exit code. All other options can be used as normal, but note that no other formatters (sh, csv
etc.) will be executed by default. At least two paths need to be passed.

Note: This even works for directories and also in combination with paranoid mode (pass -pp for
byte comparison); remember that rmlint does not care about the layout of the directory, but only
about the content of the files in it. At least two paths need to be given to the commandline.

By default this will use hashing to compare the files and/or directories.

-w --with-color (default) / -W --no-with-color
Use color escapes for pretty output or disable them. If you pipe rmlints output to a file -W is
assumed automatically.

-h --help / -H --show-man
Show a shorter reference help text (-h) or this full man page (-H).

--version
Print the version of rmlint. Includes git revision and compile time features.

Traversal Options
-s --size=range (default: 1 )
Only consider files as duplicates in a certain size range. The format of range is min-max, where
both ends can be specified as a number with an optional multiplier. The available multipliers are:

• C (1^1), W (2^1), B (512^1), K (1000^1), KB (1024^1), M (1000^2), MB (1024^2), G (1000^3), GB
(1024^3),

• T (1000^4), TB (1024^4), P (1000^5), PB (1024^5), E (1000^6), EB (1024^6)

The size format is about the same as dd(1) uses. A valid example would be: "100KB-2M". This
limits duplicates to a range from 100 Kilobyte to 2 Megabyte.

It's also possible to specify only one size. In this case the size is interpreted as "bigger or
equal". If you want to to filter for files up to this size you can add a - in front (-s -1M == -s
0-1M).

NOTE: The default excludes empty files from the duplicate search. Normally these are treated
specially by rmlint by handling them as other lint. If you want to include empty files as
duplicates you should lower the limit to zero:

$ rmlint -T df --size 0

-d --max-depth=depth (default: INF)
Only recurse up to this depth. A depth of 1 would disable recursion and is equivalent to a
directory listing.

-l --hardlinked (default) / -L --no-hardlinked
Whether to report hardlinked files as duplicates.

-f --followlinks / -F --no-followlinks / -@ --see-symlinks (default)
-f will always follow symbolic links. If file system loops occurs rmlint will detect this. If -F
is specified, symbolic links will be ignored completely, if -@ is specified, rmlint will see
symlinks and treats them like small files with the path to their target in them. The latter is the
default behaviour, since it is a sensible default for --merge-directories.

-x --no-crossdev / -X --crossdev (default)
Stay always on the same device (-x), or allow crossing mountpoints (-X). The latter is the
default.

-r --hidden / -R --no-hidden (default) / --partial-hidden
Also traverse hidden directories? This is often not a good idea, since directories like .git/
would be investigated. With --partial-hidden hidden files and folders are only considered if
they're inside duplicate directories (see --merge-directories).

-b --match-basename
Only consider those files as dupes that have the same basename. See also man 1 basename. The
comparison of the basenames is case-insensitive.

-B --unmatched-basename
Only consider those files as dupes that do not share the same basename. See also man 1 basename.
The comparison of the basenames is case-insensitive.

-e --match-with-extension / -E --no-match-with-extension (default)
Only consider those files as dupes that have the same file extension. For example two photos would
only match if they are a .png. The extension is compared case-insensitive, so .PNG is the same as
.png.

-i --match-without-extension / -I --no-match-without-extension (default)
Only consider those files as dupes that have the same basename minus the file extension. For
example: banana.png and banana.jpeg would be considered, while apple.png and peach.png won't. The
comparison is case-insensitive.

-n --newer-than-stamp=<timestamp_filename> / -N --newer-than=<iso8601_timestamp_or_unix_timestamp>
Only consider files (and their size siblings for duplicates) newer than a certain modification
time (mtime). The age barrier may be given as seconds since the epoch or as ISO8601-Timestamp
like 2014-09-08T00:12:32+0200.

-n expects a file from which it can read the timestamp. After rmlint run, the file will be updated
with the current timestamp. If the file does not initially exist, no filtering is done but the
stampfile is still written.

-N, in contrast, takes the timestamp directly and will not write anything.

Note that rmlint will find duplicates newer than timestamp, even if the original is older. If you
want only find duplicates where both original and duplicate are newer than timestamp you can use
find(1):

• find -mtime -1 | rmlint - # find all files younger than a day

Note: you can make rmlint write out a compatible timestamp with:

• -O stamp:stdout # Write a seconds-since-epoch timestamp to stdout on finish.

• -O stamp:stdout -c stamp:iso8601 # Same, but write as ISO8601.

Original Detection Options
-k --keep-all-tagged / -K --keep-all-untagged
Don't delete any duplicates that are in tagged paths (-k) or that are in non-tagged paths (-K).
(Tagged paths are those that were named after //).

-m --must-match-tagged / -M --must-match-untagged
Only look for duplicates of which at least one is in one of the tagged paths. (Paths that were
named after //).

-S --rank-by=criteria (default: pOma)
Sort the files in a group of duplicates into originals and duplicates by one or more criteria.
Each criteria is defined by a single letter (except r and x which expect a regex pattern after the
letter). Multiple criteria may be given as string, where the first criteria is the most important.
If one criteria cannot decide between original and duplicate the next one is tried.

• m: keep lowest mtime (oldest) M: keep highest mtime (newest)

• a: keep first alphabetically A: keep last alphabetically

• p: keep first named path P: keep last named path

• d: keep path with lowest depth D: keep path with highest depth

• l: keep path with shortest basename L: keep path with longest basename

• r: keep paths matching regex R: keep path not matching regex

• x: keep basenames matching regex X: keep basenames not matching regex

• h: keep file with lowest hardlink count H: keep file with highest hardlink count

• o: keep file with lowest number of hardlinks outside of the paths traversed by rmlint.

• O: keep file with highest number of hardlinks outside of the paths traversed by rmlint.

Alphabetical sort will only use the basename of the file and ignore its case. One can have
multiple criteria, e.g.: -S am will choose first alphabetically; if tied then by mtime. Note:
original path criteria (specified using //) will always take first priority over -S options.

For more fine grained control, it is possible to give a regular expression to sort by. This can be
useful when you know a common fact that identifies original paths (like a path component being src
or a certain file ending).

To use the regular expression you simply enclose it in the criteria string by adding
<REGULAR_EXPRESSION> after specifying r or x. Example: -S 'r<.*\.bak$>' makes all files that have
a .bak suffix original files.

Warning: When using r or x, try to make your regex to be as specific as possible! Good practice
includes adding a $ anchor at the end of the regex.

Tips:

• l is useful for files like file.mp3 vs file.1.mp3 or file.mp3.bak.

• a can be used as last criteria to assert a defined order.

• o/O and h/H are only useful if there any hardlinks in the traversed path.

• o/O takes the number of hardlinks outside the traversed paths (and thereby minimizes/maximizes
the overall number of hardlinks). h/H in contrast only takes the number of hardlinks inside of
the traversed paths. When hardlinking files, one would like to link to the original file with
the highest outer link count (O) in order to maximise the space cleanup. H does not maximise the
space cleanup, it just selects the file with the highest total hardlink count. You usually want
to specify O.

• pOma is the default since p ensures that first given paths rank as originals, O ensures that
hardlinks are handled well, m ensures that the oldest file is the original and a simply ensures
a defined ordering if no other criteria applies.

Caching
--replay
Read an existing json file and re-output it. When --replay is given, rmlint does no input/output
on the filesystem, even if you pass additional paths. The paths you pass will be used for
filtering the --replay output.

This is very useful if you want to reformat, refilter or resort the output you got from a previous
run. Usage is simple: Just pass --replay on the second run, with other changed to the new
formatters or filters. Pass the .json files of the previous runs additionally to the paths you ran
rmlint on. You can also merge several previous runs by specifying more than one .json file, in
this case it will merge all files given and output them as one big run.

If you want to view only the duplicates of certain subdirectories, just pass them on the
commandline as usual.

The usage of // has the same effect as in a normal run. It can be used to prefer one .json file
over another. However note that running rmlint in --replay mode includes no real disk traversal,
i.e. only duplicates from previous runs are printed. Therefore specifying new paths will simply
have no effect. As a security measure, --replay will ignore files whose mtime changed in the
meantime (i.e. mtime in the .json file differes from the current one). These files might have been
modified and are silently ignored.

By design, some options will not have any effect. Those are:

• --followlinks

• --algorithm

• --paranoid

• --clamp-low

• --hardlinked

• --write-unfinished

• ... and all other caching options below.

NOTE: In --replay mode, a new .json file will be written to rmlint.replay.json in order to avoid
overwriting rmlint.json.

--xattr-read / --xattr-write / --xattr-clear
Read or write cached checksums from the extended file attributes. This feature can be used to
speed up consecutive runs.

CAUTION: This could potentially lead to false positives if file contents are somehow modified
without changing the file mtime.

NOTE: Many tools do not support extended file attributes properly, resulting in a loss of the
information when copying the file or editing it. Also, this is a linux specific feature that
works not on all filesystems and only if you have write permissions to the file.

Usage example:

$ rmlint large_file_cluster/ -U --xattr-write # first run.
$ rmlint large_file_cluster/ --xattr-read # second run.

-U --write-unfinished
Include files in output that have not been hashed fully (i.e. files that do not appear to have a
duplicate). This is mainly useful in conjunction with --xattr-write/read. When re-running rmlint
on a large dataset this can greatly speed up a re-run in some cases.

Rarely used, miscellaneous options
-t --threads=N (default: 16)
The number of threads to use during file tree traversal and hashing. rmlint probably knows better
than you how to set the value.

-u --max-paranoid-mem=size
Apply a maximum number of bytes to use for --paranoid. The size-description has the same format
as for --size.

-q --clamp-low=[fac.tor|percent%|offset] (default: 0) / -Q --clamp-top=[fac.tor|percent%|offset]
(default: 1.0)
The argument can be either passed as factor (a number with a . in it), a percent value (suffixed
by %) or as absolute number or size spec, like in --size.

Only look at the content of files in the range of from low to (including) high. This means, if the
range is less than -q 0% to -Q 100%, than only partial duplicates are searched. If the file size
is less than the clamp limits, the file is ignored during traversing. Be careful when using this
function, you can easily get dangerous results for small files.

This is useful in a few cases where a file consists of a constant sized header or footer. With
this option you can just compare the data in between. Also it might be useful for approximate
comparison where it suffices when the file is the same in the middle part.

-Z --mtime-window=T (default: -1)
Only consider those files as duplicates that have the same content and the same modification time
(mtime) within a certain window of T seconds. If T is 0, both files need to have the same mtime.
For T=1 they may differ one second and so on. If the window size is negative, the mtime of
duplicates will not be considered. T may be a floating point number.

However, with three (or more) files, the mtime difference between two duplicates can be bigger
than the mtime window T, i.e. several files may be chained together by the window. Example: If T
is 1, the four files fooA (mtime: 00:00:00), fooB (00:00:01), fooC (00:00:02), fooD (00:00:03)
would all belong to the same duplicate group, although the mtime of fooA and fooD differs by 3
seconds.

--with-fiemap (default) / --without-fiemap
Enable or disable reading the file extents on rotational disk in order to optimize disk access
patterns.

FORMATTERS
• csv: Output all found lint as comma-separated-value list.

Available options:

• no_header: Do not write a first line describing the column headers.

•

sh: Output all found lint as shell script This formatter is activated
as default.

Available options:

• cmd: Specify a user defined command to run on duplicates. The command can be any valid
/bin/sh-expression. The duplicate path and original path can be accessed via "$1" and "$2". The
command will be written to the user_command function in the sh-file produced by rmlint.

• handler Define a comma separated list of handlers to try on duplicate files in that given order until
one handler succeeds. Handlers are just the name of a way of getting rid of the file and can be any
of the following:

• clone: btrfs only. Try to clone both files with the BTRFS_IOC_FILE_EXTENT_SAME ioctl(3p). This will
physically delete duplicate extents. Needs at least kernel 4.2.

• reflink: Try to reflink the duplicate file to the original. See also --reflink in man 1 cp. Fails
if the filesystem does not support it.

• hardlink: Replace the duplicate file with a hardlink to the original file. The resulting files will
have the same inode number. Fails if both files are not on the same partition. You can use ls -i
to show the inode number of a file and find -samefile <path> to find all hardlinks for a certain
file.

• symlink: Tries to replace the duplicate file with a symbolic link to the original. Never fails.

• remove: Remove the file using rm -rf. (-r for duplicate dirs). Never fails.

• usercmd: Use the provided user defined command (-c sh:cmd=something). Never fails.

Default is remove.

• link: Shortcut for -c sh:handler=clone,reflink,hardlink,symlink.

• hardlink: Shortcut for -c sh:handler=hardlink,symlink.

• symlink: Shortcut for -c sh:handler=symlink.

• json: Print a JSON-formatted dump of all found reports. Outputs all finds as a json document. The
document is a list of dictionaries, where the first and last element is the header and the footer
respectively, everything between are data-dictionaries.

Available options:

• no_header=[true|false]: Print the header with metadata.

• no_footer=[true|false]: Print the footer with statistics.

• oneline=[true|false]: Print one json document per line.

• py: Outputs a python script and a JSON document, just like the json formatter. The JSON document is
written to .rmlint.json, executing the script will make it read from there. This formatter is mostly
intented for complex use-cases where the lint needs special handling. Therefore the python script can
be modified to do things standard rmlint is not able to do easily.

• stamp:

Outputs a timestamp of the time rmlint was run.

Available options:

• iso8601=[true|false]: Write an ISO8601 formatted timestamps or seconds since epoch?

• progressbar: Shows a progressbar. This is meant for use with stdout or stderr [default].

See also: -g (--progress) for a convenience shortcut option.

Available options:

• update_interval=number: Number of milliseconds to wait between updates. Higher values use less
resources (default 50).

• ascii: Do not attempt to use unicode characters, which might not be supported by some terminals.

• fancy: Use a more fancy style for the progressbar.

• pretty: Shows all found items in realtime nicely colored. This formatter is activated as default.

• summary: Shows counts of files and their respective size after the run. Also list all written output
files.

• fdupes: Prints an output similar to the popular duplicate finder fdupes(1). At first a progressbar is
printed on stderr. Afterwards the found files are printed on stdout; each set of duplicates gets
printed as a block separated by newlines. Originals are highlighted in green. At the bottom a summary
is printed on stderr. This is mostly useful for scripts that were set up for parsing fdupes output. We
recommend the json formatter for every other scripting purpose.

Available options:

• omitfirst: Same as the -f / --omitfirst option in fdupes(1). Omits the first line of each set of
duplicates (i.e. the original file.

• sameline: Same as the -1 / --sameline option in fdupes(1). Does not print newlines between files,
only a space. Newlines are printed only between sets of duplicates.

EXAMPLES
This is a collection of common usecases and other tricks:

• Check the current working directory for duplicates.

$ rmlint

• Show a progressbar:

$ rmlint -g

• Quick re-run on large datasets using different ranking criteria on second run:

$ rmlint large_dir/ # First run; writes rmlint.json

$ rmlint --replay rmlint.json large_dir -S MaD

• Merge together previous runs, but prefer the originals to be from b.json and make sure that no files
are deleted from b.json:

$ rmlint --replay a.json // b.json -k

• Search only for duplicates and duplicate directories

$ rmlint -T "df,dd" .

• Compare files byte-by-byte in current directory:

$ rmlint -pp .

• Find duplicates with same basename (excluding extension):

$ rmlint -e

• Do more complex traversal using find(1).

$ find /usr/lib -iname '*.so' -type f | rmlint - # find all duplicate .so files

$ find ~/pics -iname '*.png' | ./rmlint - # compare png files only

• Limit file size range to investigate:

$ rmlint -s 2GB # Find everything >= 2GB

$ rmlint -s 0-2GB # Find everything < 2GB

• Only find writable and executable files:

$ rmlint --perms wx

• Reflink on btrfs, else try to hardlink duplicates to original. If that does not work, replace duplicate
with a symbolic link:

$ rmlint -c sh:link

• Inject user-defined command into shell script output:

$ rmlint -o sh -c sh:cmd='echo "original:" "$2" "is the same as" "$1"'

• Use data as master directory. Find only duplicates in backup that are also in data. Do not delete any
files in data:

$ rmlint backup // data --keep-all-tagged --must-match-tagged

• Compare if the directories a b c and are equal

$ rmlint --equal a b c; echo $? # Will print 0 if they are equal

PROBLEMS
1. False Positives: Depending on the options you use, there is a very slight risk of false positives
(files that are erroneously detected as duplicate). The default hash function (SHA1) is pretty safe
but in theory it is possible for two files to have then same hash. This happens about once in 2 ** 80
files, so it is very very unlikely. If you're concerned just use the --paranoid (-pp) option. This
will compare all the files byte-by-byte and is not much slower than SHA1.

2. File modification during or after rmlint run: It is possible that a file that rmlint recognized as
duplicate is modified afterwards, resulting in a different file. If you use the rmlint-generated
shell script to delete the duplicates, you can run it with the -p option to do a full re-check of the
duplicate against the original before it deletes the file. When using -c sh:hardlink or -c sh:symlink
care should be taken that a modification of one file will now result in a modification of all files.
This is not the case for -c sh:reflink or -c sh:clone. Use -c sh:link to minimise this risk.

AUTHOR

       Christopher Pahl, Daniel Thomas

COPYRIGHT

       2014-2017, Christopher Pahl & Daniel Thomas

                                                  Jul 30, 2017                                         RMLINT(1)