Write zeros to empty space.

[firebyrd10]

Is there some way to write all 0's to the empty space on my ext3 partition. Tis isn't for security but rahter for compression. When I made an image of the parttion it was 3.2 gigs compressed. But only 1.4 gigs are acually used. The rest is ghost data from files long gone that the OS can ignore but not the compression. Which means if I were able to write zeros on all the free space, the compressed size would decrease dramaticly.

[garyng]

1. go to a mount point under the fs
2. dd if=/dev/null of=rubbish
3. rm rubbish

[firebyrd10]

Worked like a charm. Got the image size down to 640 megs.

Thanks