How to Install and Uninstall zerofree Package on Ubuntu 21.10 (Impish Indri)

Last updated: May 14,2024

1. Install "zerofree" package

Please follow the instructions below to install zerofree on Ubuntu 21.10 (Impish Indri)

$ sudo apt update $ sudo apt install zerofree

2. Uninstall "zerofree" package

Please follow the instructions below to uninstall zerofree on Ubuntu 21.10 (Impish Indri):

$ sudo apt remove zerofree $ sudo apt autoclean && sudo apt autoremove

3. Information about the zerofree package on Ubuntu 21.10 (Impish Indri)

Package: zerofree
Architecture: amd64
Version: 1.1.1-1build2
Priority: extra
Section: admin
Origin: Ubuntu
Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers
Original-Maintainer: Thibaut Paumard
Bugs: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+filebug
Installed-Size: 30
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.34), libext2fs2 (>= 1.42)
Filename: pool/main/z/zerofree/zerofree_1.1.1-1build2_amd64.deb
Size: 8752
MD5sum: 67df5b367080c382a2528cdcd6e4d38f
SHA1: 54639f15e768be617886aa524eda9655128d7c03
SHA256: f6327a9ff83730714dbee77bdc1c1db28a5467e58125adfa4f9aa4b801a5443e
SHA512: 5e0b29c91f57b4aa3ef056137fc07d2aa7c33810dba87df8b23da32c18074d9f4851316de6526ab739e3adc4097da45241dfac0fcb677ad29499235cea5720ef
Homepage: https://frippery.org/uml/
Description-en: 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").
Description-md5: e8c47b284082ddf9145a003c9cbeafdb
Task: cloud-image, server, ubuntu-server-raspi