How To Install zerofree.x86_64 on Amazon Linux 2

In this tutorial we learn how to install zerofree.x86_64 in Amazon Linux 2. zerofree.x86_64 is Utility to force unused ext2 inodes and blocks to zero

Introduction

In this tutorial we learn how to install zerofree.x86_64 on Amazon Linux 2.

What is zerofree.x86_64

zerofree is a utility to set unused filesystem inodes and blocks of an ext2 filesystem to zero. This can improve the compressibility and privacy of an ext2 filesystem. This tool was inspired by the ext2fs privacy (i.e. secure deletion) patch described in a Linux kernel mailing list thread. WARNING mounted read-only. The tool tries to check this before running, but you should be careful.

We can use yum to install zerofree.x86_64 on Amazon Linux 2. In this tutorial we discuss both methods but you only need to choose one of method to install zerofree.x86_64.

Install zerofree.x86_64 on Amazon Linux 2 Using yum

Update yum database with yum using the following command.

sudo yum makecache --refresh

After updating yum database, We can install zerofree.x86_64 using yum by running the following command:

sudo yum -y install zerofree.x86_64

How To Uninstall zerofree.x86_64 on Amazon Linux 2

To uninstall only the zerofree.x86_64 package we can use the following command:

sudo yum remove zerofree.x86_64

zerofree.x86_64 Package Contents on Amazon Linux 2

/usr/sbin/sparsify
/usr/sbin/zerofree
/usr/share/doc/zerofree-1.0.3
/usr/share/doc/zerofree-1.0.3/COPYING
/usr/share/doc/zerofree-1.0.3/index.html
/usr/share/man/man8/zerofree.8.gz

References

Summary

In this tutorial we learn how to install zerofree.x86_64 on Amazon Linux 2 using yum.