fs_inspect - understand your filesystem

fs_inspect (or fsi for short) is a command line tool which quickly gives you an overview about wanted or unwanted redundancy in your folders and whole file system. Are your backups complete? Can you savely remove a folder to free space without deleting unique files?

While directory comparing tools like diff or meld can precisely tell you differences between directories they fail when the directory structure or file names change in only one of the directories or when you simply can't just compare two folders because your files are distriubted over the whole file system.

Here are some of fs_inspect's key features:

• when comparing folders only the file content matters - not the directory structure
• once indexed a folder can be processed very quickly
• fs_inspect is platform independent among any OS that can provide Python2.7+

Development status: currently the add, diff and check-dups commands are working on an experimental basis, others are expected to work soon.

Here are some examples for how you can youse fs_inspect:

`fsi add ./some/folder`

This will inspect a folder's content using sha1 checksums where needed and store the information in your filesystem.

`fsi diff ./some/folder ./some_other/folder`

Compare the two folders contents - no matter how the folder structure looks like and how the files are named. You will get two lists of files which are contained in each of the folders and not in the other.

`fsi check-dups ./some/folder`

Lists all files located in ./some/folder which have duplicates somewhere.

`fsi check-backup ./some/folder`

Acts like check-dups but will report every file which has backup somewhere.

fs_inspect aims at answering the following questions:

• are there any files in a given directory without a recent backup?
• are there doublettes of a given file or a number of files apart from intended backups?
• do two given folders have the same content? (independently from directory structure)
• are there files with same content but different names?
• are there files with same names but different content?

In comparison to a usual directory differ fsi behaves different in some ways. Please note that fsi does not aim at being a better directory differ (yet) but wants to give a rough hint where to have a closer look without struggling with restructured directories or renamed files. Here are some differences in behavior you should know:

• when handling files symbolic links are ignored
• files with size 0 are ignored
• fsi only recognizes equal files on a binary basis (using a hash of a file). Files which only differ in spaces etc. are just identified as different. Please use tools like meld, hexdiff etc. for further investigation.