Package: zerofree (1.1.1-1 and others)

[ Source: zerofree  ]

zero free blocks from ext2, ext3 and ext4 file-systems

Zerofree finds the unallocated blocks with non-zero value content in an ext2, ext3 or ext4 file-system and fills them with zeroes (zerofree can also work with another value than zero). This is mostly 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" to 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. (One other use case would be to erase sensitive data a little bit more securely than with a simple "rm").

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

Other Packages Related to zerofree

• dep: libc6 (>= 2.34)

  GNU C Library: Shared libraries
  also a virtual package provided by libc6-udeb

• dep: libext2fs2t64 (>= 1.42)

  ext2/ext3/ext4 file system libraries

Download zerofree

Download for all available architectures

Architecture	Version	Package Size	Installed Size	Files
riscv64	1.1.1-1+b2	7.9 kB	26.0 kB	[list of files]