Czkawka

Czkawka (Polish for "hiccup") is a fast, free, and open-source tool for finding and removing unnecessary files from your system. Written entirely in Rust, it offers a CLI, a GTK4 desktop GUI, and a newer Slint-based GUI called Krokiet — all sharing the same czkawka_core library. With over 30k GitHub stars, it has become one of the most popular disk-cleanup utilities in the Linux ecosystem.

The project ships three distinct frontends: czkawka_cli for scripting and headless use, czkawka_gui (GTK4, now in maintenance mode), and Krokiet (Slint, the actively developed GUI). All three expose the same powerful scanning engine with multi-threading and a persistent cache for repeat scans.

Features

• Duplicate files — Find duplicates by name, size, or cryptographic hash
• Similar images — Perceptual hashing to detect near-identical images regardless of resize or compression
• Similar videos — Frame-based comparison to surface duplicate video files
• Same music — Match tracks by audio tags or content fingerprint
• Empty folders and files — Locate and remove zero-byte files and empty directory trees
• Temporary files — Identify leftover build artifacts, editor swap files, and other junk
• Big files — List the largest files consuming disk space
• Bad extensions — Flag files whose extensions don't match their actual content type
• Broken files — Detect corrupted or unreadable files
• Exif remover — Strip EXIF metadata from images in bulk
• Invalid symbolic links — Find dangling symlinks pointing to non-existent targets
• Multi-threaded scanning — Parallelised across all CPU cores with optional scan cache for fast repeat runs
• Multiple frontends — Use czkawka_cli for automation or the GTK4/Slint GUIs for interactive cleanup

Installation

CLI

cargo install czkawka_cli

GUI (Flatpak — all distros)

# Krokiet (Slint GUI — actively maintained)
flatpak install flathub com.github.qarmin.krokiet

# Czkawka GTK4 GUI (maintenance mode)
flatpak install flathub com.github.qarmin.czkawka

Both GUI applications are available on Flathub.

Arch Linux

# CLI + GTK4 GUI
yay -S czkawka

# Krokiet (Slint GUI)
yay -S krokiet

Debian / Ubuntu · Fedora

Pre-built binaries for Linux (CLI and GUI) are available on the releases page. Download the appropriate archive, extract it, and place the binary on your $PATH.

# Debian / Ubuntu
# No official package — use the Flatpak above or download from the releases page.

# Fedora
# No official package — use the Flatpak above or download from the releases page.

Build from source

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

# CLI only
cargo build --release -p czkawka_cli

# GTK4 GUI (requires libgtk-4-dev)
cargo build --release -p czkawka_gui

# Krokiet (Slint GUI)
cargo build --release -p krokiet

Usage

Find duplicate files

# Scan home directory for duplicates by hash, print results to stdout
czkawka_cli duplicates --directories ~/

# Scan multiple directories, exclude a path, delete duplicates automatically
czkawka_cli duplicates \
  --directories ~/Documents ~/Downloads \
  --excluded-directories ~/.cache \
  --delete-method AEO   # AllExceptOldest

Find similar images

# Search for perceptually similar images (similarity threshold 10)
czkawka_cli similar-images --directories ~/Pictures --similarity-preset High

Find empty folders

czkawka_cli empty-folders --directories ~/Projects

Find the biggest files

# List the 25 largest files under /home
czkawka_cli biggest-files --directories /home --number-of-files 25

Find temporary files

czkawka_cli temporary --directories ~/

JSON output for scripting

# All subcommands support --json for machine-readable output
czkawka_cli duplicates --directories ~/ --json > duplicates.json

Interactive GUI

Launch Krokiet or czkawka_gui from your application launcher or run:

krokiet      # Slint GUI
czkawka_gui  # GTK4 GUI

Select one or more directories in the sidebar, choose a scan type from the left panel, click Search, review the results, and use the action buttons to move, delete, or hardlink the unwanted files.

Czkawka vs similar tools