ZUM(1)

📦 version 1.2, in debian bookworm, debian trixie, ubuntu jammy, ubuntu noble, ubuntu questing

💖 ZUM — bestie edition 💖

okay so this is zum, from the Debian Manual, section 1 (that's the user commands girlies 💅). buckle up.

✨ NAME ✨

zum — free up disk space by making holes in files 🕳️✨

🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

zum [FILE]...

that's it. that's the whole vibe. no flags, no drama, just files. 💀

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

okay so here's the tea 🍵 — zum reads a list of files straight off the command line, and then it attempts to perforate them. yes, perforate. like a hole punch but for your filesystem, lowkey iconic. 🕳️

and what does perforation actually mean? it means runs of 0 bytes get replaced with lseek(2)s. so basically instead of your file system storing a whole bunch of literal zeroes, zum is like "bestie, we don't need to store those, we can just skip them 💅", which gives the file system a chance to not allocate real disk space for those bytes. free real estate. periodt. 🏠✨

ngl that's the whole thing. no flags, no options, no environment variables, just vibes and holes.

🌸 EXAMPLE 🌸

here's the classic, the moment, the main character energy ✨:

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 zum

look at that pipeline. so clean. so slay. 🧚

🚨 BESTIE WAIT 🚨 if you zum under /boot, where your kernel image lives, your system will become unbootable unless you run lilo again. like. do not do this casually. this is not a drill. this is a "your computer will not turn on" situation. 😭💀

👑 AUTHOR 👑

Oleg Kibirev <oleg@gd.cs.CSUFresno.edu>. 🫶

Manual page by Heiko Schlittermann <heiko@lotte.sax.de>. 💜

and that's the whole page, bestie!! brought to you by the Debian Project, dated April 16, 2001 (yes she's an elder but she still eats 🍓), and this is ZUM(1) signing off 💖✨🎀

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