Is there a program that will fully defragment my hard disk under Linux? I know with today's journalized file systems (like efs3 and reiser), it keeps everything sorta defragmented by putting all of the file in one place, but can I occasionally rearrange all those files to where they are all in the same section of the disk? I've googled and freshmeated and found nothing.

Modern file systems don't try to put all of the files in one place. They try to space files out intelligently across the file system which is how they avoid fragmentation. Because fragmentation is not a problem there is no incentive to write defrag programs.

You can defrag any file system by copying the files to another partition, formating the file system, and copying the files back. If you do that the only file systems that will put the files all in one spot are the ones that have chronic fragmentation problems like FAT32.

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Steve Stites

It would be hard to do that with my system partition that also includes my home folder. I was hoping for something I could run occasionally to spruce up my file system in single user mode.

As jailbait said: you don't need to. Unless you made a
conscious effort to write many little files first (and
almost fill the partition to the brim) and then started
deleting many of those and adding large files after that
(still assuming the file-system is nearly full) there's
NO NEED for de-fragmentation.



Cheers,
Tink