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I've seen instructions for shrinking the .vdi image for a Windows guest machine in VirtualBox 4.1.8. However, it used a tool to write zeroes to free space in the .vdi (nullfile-1.02.exe) that is for Windows only.

The page did say you should find a zerospace.c to do so in a Linux guest, but I can't find such a file any where on the Internet.

Does anyone here have experience shrinking VirtualBox Linux guests?

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1 Answer

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Writing zeroes to free space isn't difficult (even on Windows!). Just write a file containing zeroes, until you run out of space. On unix, it's a simple shell command:

cat /dev/zero >fill_er_up
rm fill_er_up
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oh yeah good idea! I'll try it and report back... – hpy Feb 5 '12 at 1:36
And it worked! Thanks for your tip! – hpy Feb 5 '12 at 2:56

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