Actively used filesystems on servers and desktop systems tend to rise in size, to hold invalid objects and to contain problematic filenames. Linux distributions come with a tool called ‘fslint’, that may help you to identify these kind of problems.

The Tool – Fslint

Fslint is a utility to fix problems with filesystems’ data, like duplicate files. It includes a GTK+ GUI as well as a command line interface and can be used to reclaim disk space. It has an interface for uninstalling packages, and it can find things like:

• Duplicate files
• Problematic filenames
• Temporary files
• Bad symlinks
• Empty directories
• Nonstripped binaries

Screenshots

The following screenshot illustrates how to use the GUI of the application to find bad names of filesystem objects.

As you can see there are a lot of additional options to analyse a set of local and remote filesystems.

To get an idea what ‘lslint’ is able to do and whether it can help you to identify problems in your filesystems, you should give it a try. To install ‘fslint’ you might utilize the package manager of your distribution. Beside the available GUI frontend there is a command line interface available without the need to run a windowing system.

Related resources:

• Homepage of lslint