Tip - Reduce the size of compressed *nix VM archives

This tip is from this thread on the VMware forums...

In each filesystem that you need to zero out, run the following command:
dd if=/dev/zero of=filler bs=1000
What this does is fills all free space in the filesystem with a single file called filler, which is filled with binary zeros. Once the command predictably dies and moans that the disk is full, you must delete the file:
rm filler
I have run this on a VM (without deleting anything else) and reduced the zipped size successfully from 786881 kb to 390247 kb, which is a hell of a lot easier to download....

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Tip - Reduce the size of compressed *nix VM archives