DOS ain't dead

ZEROFILL R2.01 released! (Announce)

posted by Rugxulo , Usono, 01.02.2025, 00:30

I only vaguely recall that some previous version of yours would crash (only) under VirtualBox. I ended up writing my own in i8086-msdos FreePascal (using int64 and DOS unit's FAT32-aware DiskFree function). That was on my MetaDOS floppy image to clear junk (deleted) data, mostly just to compress better.

For comparison, there are other ways to do it.

* Jason Hood (Jadoxa) modified a WIPE utility to add both LFN and FAT32 awareness.
* UNIX dd is probably ideal, but I doubt our DOS ports (GNUish or DJGPP) support /dev/zero or /dev/random . At the very least, they are too old to support progress info. (I also haven't heavily tested the UnxUtils Win32 version.)
* Does DJGPP's old (CoreUtils) FileUtils have SHRED? Probably, but that's more for security than just zeroing out for better compression.
* There's probably an easy way in 4DOS to do the same thing.

Complete thread:

• ZEROFILL R2.00 released! - Guti, 30.01.2025, 11:24 (Announce)
  • ZEROFILL R2.01 released! - Guti, 30.01.2025, 13:01
    • ZEROFILL R2.01 released! - Rugxulo, 01.02.2025, 00:30
      • ZEROFILL R2.01 released! - Guti, 03.02.2025, 06:05