Information about the apt package "zerofree".

Package

zerofree

Version

1.0.3-1

Priority

extra

Section

admin

Origin

Ubuntu

Maintainer

Ubuntu Developers <ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com>

Original Maintainer

Thibaut Paumard <thibaut@debian.org>

Bugs

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+filebug

Installed Size

51.2 kB

Depends

e2fslibs (>= 1.37), libc6 (>= 2.3.4)

Homepage

http://intgat.tigress.co.uk/rmy/uml/index.html

Task

cloud-image, server

Supported

5y

Download Size

7,928 B

APT Manual Installed

yes

APT Sources

http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial/main amd64 Packages

Description

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").

Install Info

artful,now 1.0.4-1 amd64

Installed Automatically

False

Files

/./
/usr/
/usr/sbin/
/usr/sbin/zerofree*
/usr/share/
/usr/share/doc/
/usr/share/doc/zerofree/
/usr/share/doc/zerofree/changelog.Debian.gz
/usr/share/doc/zerofree/copyright
/usr/share/man/
/usr/share/man/man8/
/usr/share/man/man8/zerofree.8.gz