shred | was Re: [oclug] How do I nuke the contents of my hard drive?

[Brad Barnett]

cat /dev/random > filename

Fill up the entire hard drive, delete, do it again for fun ;)


On 01 Aug 2002 19:38:29 -0400
Dave Edwards <dle1 at sympatico.ca> wrote:

> On Thu, 2002-08-01 at 18:26, Vic Gedris wrote:
> 
> >
> > If you want to be extra careful so that nobody can recover any data,
> > you'll want to do a bit more than that.....like do something to write
> > random junk to the entire hard drive, several times.  If not sure
> > exactly how you would do that in Linux, however...
> > 
> 
> There's shred, but reading its manpage just now, it suggests that it's
> not effective on a journalling filesystem, which many or most Linux
> users now have.  However, I think that warning applies only to its
> removal & truncating functionality.  I don't know the particulars of
> journalling filesystems well enough to know why that is so.
> 
> Since it apparently is so, is there another way to anihilate a file or
> files from a harddrive?
> 
> By the way, it's impossible to do something like
> # shred --recursive /
> I guess that's good.  ;)
> 
> Dave.