diff options
author | B. Watson <yalhcru@gmail.com> | 2014-10-30 10:08:25 +0700 |
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committer | Willy Sudiarto Raharjo <willysr@slackbuilds.org> | 2014-10-30 20:27:35 +0700 |
commit | 90b90cd3d87959d9408dfb6261516d1f790dca86 (patch) | |
tree | 3b36e62903e3ce984aa268daf86e5b7f4adc5868 /system/zerofree/zerofree.8 | |
parent | db05daf9995de9221288c777b3fbc642caaf07bf (diff) |
system/zerofree: Added man page.
Signed-off-by: Willy Sudiarto Raharjo <willysr@slackbuilds.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'system/zerofree/zerofree.8')
-rw-r--r-- | system/zerofree/zerofree.8 | 92 |
1 files changed, 92 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/system/zerofree/zerofree.8 b/system/zerofree/zerofree.8 new file mode 100644 index 0000000000000..fb6f277e7bd50 --- /dev/null +++ b/system/zerofree/zerofree.8 @@ -0,0 +1,92 @@ +.TH "ZEROFREE" "8" +.SH "NAME" +zerofree \(em zero free blocks from ext2, ext3 and ext4 file-systems +.SH "SYNOPSIS" +.PP +\fBzerofree\fR [\fB-n\fP] [\fB-v\fP] [\fB-f fillval\fP] \fIfilesystem\fR +.SH "DESCRIPTION" +.PP +\fBzerofree\fR finds the unallocated, +blocks with non-zero value content in an ext2, ext3 or ext4 +\fIfilesystem\fR (e.g. /dev/hda1) and +fills them with zeroes (or another octet of your choice). + + +.PP +Filling unused areas with zeroes 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. + +.PP +Filling unused areas may also be useful with solid-state +drives (SSDs). On some SSDs, filling blocks with ones (0xFF) +is reported to trigger Flash block erasure by the firmware, +possibly giving a write performance increase. + +.PP +The usual way to achieve the same result (zeroing the +unallocated blocks) is to run \fBdd\fR (1) 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: +.IP " \(bu" 6 +it is slow; +.IP " \(bu" 6 +it makes the disk image (temporarily) grow to its maximal +extent; +.IP " \(bu" 6 +it (temporarily) uses all free space on the disk, so other +concurrent write actions may fail. + +.PP +\fIfilesystem\fR has to be unmounted or +mounted read-only for \fBzerofree\fR to work. It +will exit with an error message if the +\fIfilesystem\fR is mounted writable. To +remount the root file-system readonly, you can first switch to +single user runlevel (\fBtelinit 1\fR) then use +\fBmount \-o remount,ro +\fIfilesystem\fR\fR. + +.PP +\fBzerofree\fR has been written to be run +from GNU/Linux systems installed as guest OSes inside a virtual +machine. In this case, it is typically run from within the guest +system, and a utility is then run from the host system to shrink +disk image (\fBVBoxManage modifyhd \-\-compact\fR, +provided with virtualbox, is able to do that for some disk image +formats). + +.PP +It may however be useful in other situations: for instance +it can be used to make it more difficult to retrieve deleted +data. Beware that securely deleting sensitive data is not in +general an easy task and usually requires writing several times +on the deleted blocks. + +.SH "OPTIONS" +.IP "\fB-n\fP " 10 +Perform a dry run (do not modify the file-system); +.IP "\fB-v\fP " 10 +Be verbose; +.IP "\fB-f value\fP " 10 +Specify the octet value to fill empty blocks with (defaults to +0). Argument must be within the range 0 to 255. +.SH "SEE ALSO" +.PP +dd (1). +.SH "AUTHOR" +.PP +This manual page was written by Thibaut Paumard <paumard@users.sourceforge.net> for +the \fBDebian\fP system (but may be used by others). Permission is +granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under +the terms of the GNU General Public License, Version 2 or any +later version published by the Free Software Foundation. + +.PP +On Debian systems, the complete text of the GNU General Public +License can be found in /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2. + +.\" created by instant / docbook-to-man, Mon 31 Mar 2014, 15:41 |