[NTLUG:Discuss] filling empty partition space with zeros

[Ed Leach]

I'd like to fill the empty space of an ext3 partition with zeros in
order to make it compress better. From this page:

    http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=64150

I see this suggestion:

    dd if=/dev/zero of=/path/to/partition/zerofill.tmp & rm
/path/to/partition/zerofill.tmp

I think I would have said

    "/path/to/file/on/mounted/partition/zerofill.tmp"

rather than his example.

Before I really hurt myself -

Is this the best, safest way to do it? (Security is  not a concern.)

Thanks,

Ed