zerofree
zero free blocks from ext2, ext3 and ext4 file-systems
Install
- All systems
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curl cmd.cat/zerofree.sh
- Debian
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apt-get install zerofree - Ubuntu
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apt-get install zerofree - Kali Linux
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apt-get install zerofree - Fedora
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dnf install zerofree - Windows (WSL2)
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sudo apt-get updatesudo apt-get install zerofree - Raspbian
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apt-get install zerofree - Dockerfile
- dockerfile.run/zerofree
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").