On Tue Sep 04 2001 at 13:31, "David L. Nicol" wrote:
> Hmm. That might not be that bad of a thing to have to do. Mount
> the partition at /mnt/C then do cat /dev/null> /mnt/C/ZEROES.000
> until it fills up, then unmount it, then do the dd into gzip into backup
> media.
Using /dev/zero rather than /dev/null is what you really want to do...
cat /dev/zero > /mnt/c/zeros.000 # or whatever
It does appear to be a nice neat trick tho... same principle would
be good for quickly and painlessly zero-filling the "dead space" on
things like ramdisks that you want to compress, or emptying the
unused space on loop-mounted floppy disk images that you may want to
compress and archive onto cdrom or make available for download, or
preparing any sort of partition for full raw archiving/mirroring and
backup, or whatever. Yep, useful.
Gems like this make it so worthwhile to lurk in places like this
mailing list... thanks :)
Cheers
Tony
