zerofree binary package in Ubuntu Precise i386
Zerofree finds the unallocated, non-zeroed blocks in an ext2 or ext3
file-system and fills them with zeroes. This is useful if the device
on which this file-system resides is a disk image. In this case,
depending on the type of disk image, a secondary utility may be able
to reduce the size of the disk image after zerofree has been
run. Zerofree requires the file-system to be unmounted or mounted
read-only.
.
The usual way to achieve the same result (zeroing the unused
blocks) is to run "dd" do create a file full of zeroes that takes up
the entire free space on the drive, and then delete this file. This
has many disadvantages, which zerofree alleviates:
* it is slow;
* it makes the disk image (temporarily) grow to its maximal extent;
* it (temporarily) uses all free space on the disk, so other
concurrent write actions may fail.
.
Zerofree has been written to be run from GNU/Linux systems installed
as guest OSes inside a virtual machine. If this is not your case, you
almost certainly don't need this package.
Publishing history
Date | Status | Target | Component | Section | Priority | Phased updates | Version | ||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
2011-10-13 14:45:10 UTC | Published | Ubuntu Precise i386 | release | universe | admin | Extra | 1.0.1-2ubuntu1 | ||
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