Package: zerofree (1.0.1-1)

zero free blocks from ext2/3 file-systems

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 unallocated 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.

Tags: System Administration: Filesystem Tool, Implemented in: C, Role: Program