How do I clear or remove unused files, as in hard drive directorys

Question

Is there a utility to defrag and clean hd's or recover crashed data. Like Nortons Disk Doctor, or Symantac's Disk Clinic?

Answer 1

There is also a good cleaning tool that I use myself, it's called Ubuntu Tweak, great tool. To install it, do:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tualatrix/ppa 

This will download the PPA repository, then you can go into Ubuntu Software Center and let Software Center do all the magic. Or you can do it all by command line (which is what I prefer) and use these commands after the PPA is loaded in your repository:

sudo apt-get update   
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-tweak  

Open the Dash and type Ubuntu Tweak then open Ubuntu Tweak with a click.

Answer 2

Try fslint. Install it by running the following command in terminal: sudo apt-get install fslint.

It's a GUI version. Go through the options after installation. You can apply those options to all drives at a time or drive by drive as you wish, using add drive/folder option.

More Info:

FSlint is a toolkit to clean filesystem lint. 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

http://fslint.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/doc/FAQ

Answer 3

Linux systems with ext4 file system does not require de-fragmentation. But if you want to delete unnecessary, temporary, caches files:

There is an application called BleachBit
it has following features:

• Clear the memory and swap on Linux
• Delete broken shortcuts on Linux
• Delete the Firefox URL history without deleting the whole file—with optional shredding
• Delete Linux localizations: delete languages you don't use. More powerful than localepurge and available on more Linux distributions.
• Clean APT for Debian, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, and Linux Mint
• Find widely-scattered junk such as Thumbs.db and .DS_Store files.
• Execute yum clean for CentOS, Fedora, and Red Hat to remove cached package data
• Delete Windows registry keys—often where MRU (most recently used) lists are stored
• Delete the OpenOffice.org recent documents list without deleting the whole Common.xcu file
• Overwrite free disk space to hide previously files
• Vacuum Firefox, Google Chrome, Liferea, Thunderbird, and Yum databases: shrink files without removing data to save space and improve speed
• Surgically remove private information from .ini and JSON configuration files and SQLite3 databases without deleting the whole file
• Overwrite data in SQLite3 before deleting it to prevent recovery (optional)