Comprehensive Disk Cleaner (file system) for Ubuntu: FSlint

When comparing with the proprietary MS Windows file systems, the GNU/Linux file systems have their advantages and disadvantages. For instance, according to the experts, GNU/Linux ones, they don't need to be de-fragmented from time to time as with MS Windows, etc ... but I do feel that still, MS FS are better at loading folders filled with thousands of files or concerning the overall performance (at least in my experience).

But the point is, apart from all these differences, there are few things that are common to almost all the file systems thus you may need to manually configure and "fix" some of those issues (not always necessary though) which not only helps to keep a "healthy" file system but it also helps to free some disk space as well.

In that sense, if you've been searching for a dedicated utility that lets you manually search and find duplicate entries, broken links, empty folders, etc... from a singe GUI (+ an optional command-line interface too), then FSlint is an excellent little utility.

Main features...

*. Find and remove duplicate files/folders.

*. Search for Bad File names (doesn't mean they're corrupted or anything, but you know those naughty file names with non-standard UTF characters/names, etc).

*. Name clashes: find conflicting file/folder names.

*. Temporary files.

*. Bad symbolinks (invalid shortcuts).

*. Find files with missing user IDs.

*. Find empty folders.

*. Non stripped binaries & Redundant white-spaces (not entirely sure that the do to be honest).

You can install FSlint in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal, 11.10, 10.10 and 10.04 by using the below command in your Terminal window.

sudo apt-get install fslint

But FSlint also has another very useful feature that shows installed packages and their HDD spaces thus you can even remove them/un-install directly using FSlint and it'll even calculate the dependencies and properly remove them. 

My personally favorite feature...

You can also add/exclude paths. But if you want the maximum controllability then you'll have to run it as the root user but be careful and if you don't know what you're doing, then don't search for duplicate files in the OS core locations for instance (although some folder location are automatically excluded) since it can easily break your entire OS.

Also be careful while searching and removing (even inside your Home folder) duplicate files for instance, if you search within your "Home" folder, some of those ".xml" files may have the same name but they would most probably in different locations thus removing them is not a good thing to do.

But other than that, searching for duplicate files within your manually created folders, etc in Ubuntu (also supports few other distributions), FSlint is an excellent utility. But again, please use it with caution.