How to Install and Uninstall zerofree Package on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus)

Last updated: November 26,2024

1. Install "zerofree" package

This guide covers the steps necessary to install zerofree on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus)


    
        
            $
        

        
            
                sudo apt update
            
                    
    
    Copied


    
        
            $
        

        
            
                sudo apt install
            
                        
                zerofree
            
                    
    
    Copied

2. Uninstall "zerofree" package

Please follow the guidelines below to uninstall zerofree on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus):


    
        
            $
        

        
            
                sudo apt remove
            
                        
                zerofree
            
                    
    
    Copied


    
        
            $
        

        
            
                sudo apt autoclean && sudo apt autoremove
            
                    
    
    Copied

3. Information about the zerofree package on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus)

Package: zerofree
Priority: extra
Section: admin
Installed-Size: 50
Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers
Original-Maintainer: Thibaut Paumard
Architecture: amd64
Version: 1.0.3-1
Depends: e2fslibs (>= 1.37), libc6 (>= 2.3.4)
Filename: pool/main/z/zerofree/zerofree_1.0.3-1_amd64.deb
Size: 7928
MD5sum: 67bee141c15715c0d526353534252540
SHA1: 0f375198daedcdf6a5e1b014c5ff12288da1953b
SHA256: 6e20550b6af7529e9321269e85a2c4dd1da3949d5afa0fecd0d327de30c8fb64
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
Homepage: http://intgat.tigress.co.uk/rmy/uml/index.html
Bugs: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+filebug
Origin: Ubuntu
Supported: 5y
Task: cloud-image, server