Find cruft files on Gentoo and similar distributions

Author: Martin Väth (martin at mvath.de).

This project is under the BSD license 2.0 (“3-clause BSD license”). SPDX-License-Identifier: BSD-3-Clause

Gentoo records all installed files in a database. Files not stored in this database are either manually installed or intentionally created at runtime or cruft. find_cruft will output all files which might possibly be cruft.

find_cruft is extremely configurable (by perl code) and has the possibility to e.g. check only certain subtrees for cruft. It can also emulate a chroot to some extent if you have a gentoo installation in a chroot partition.

For detailed usage instructions, type find_cruft --man after installing.

For installation, just put the content of bin somewhere into your $PATH and the content of etc into /usr/lib/find_cruft or into /etc or use later a corresponding -c option.

Put your local customization into /etc/find_cruft.d or /etc/find_cruft.pl (this will override the corresponding content of /usr/lib/find_cruft). Also put the files of the subdirectory zsh into your zsh's $fpath to obtain zsh completion support. (If you do not have root access, you can add the corresponding directory with fpath+=("...") before you call compdef from your zsh initialization files).

For installation under Gentoo, you can use the ebuild from the mv repository (which is available over eselect-repository or layman).