FS lint: A ‘Laundromat’ for File Systems

Traditionally, lint refers to small loose pieces of fibre that stick to fabric. In computer terminology, lint initially implied programs that flagged suspicious and non-portable constructs, which were likely to be bugs in C programming. Likewise FSLint he

F Slint is a collection of tools to find and clean various forms of lint on a file system. Excess or unnecessary files are referred to as file system lint. FSlint has an intuitive GTK+ GUI as well as command line interface. But for the sake of simplicity we are going to discuss only the GUI interface. The most common forms of lint are duplicate files, improper names, empty directories, broken symbolic links, etc. FSlint provides various utilities to clean file system lint and reclaim disk space. This column walks you through each of the major tools that FSlint provides.

Installation

The FSlint package is part of the official repositories of Ubuntu and Fedora. It can be installed using the apt and yum package managers, respectively. To install FSlint on Ubuntu, execute the commands shown below in a terminal: updated packages [narendra]$ sudo apt-get install fslint # Install FSlint package [narendra]$ whereis fslint # Verify the installation FSlint: /usr/share/FSlint /usr/share/man/man1/Fslint.1.gz That’s it. We are done with the installation. To install FSlint on other GNU/Linux distributions, go through the official website of the FSLint at http://www. pixelbeat.org/FSlint/ which describes installation steps.

Demystifying the GUI interface

Now that the installation is done, let us get our hands dirty with FSlint. For this demonstration, I am using the Ubuntu 14.04.1 MATE edition but FSlint’s usage and experience should be the same on other distributions.

To launch FSlint from the GTK+ GUI, traverse to Applications->System Tools->FSlint. Command line junkies