Re: Help with (relatively) securely deleting files?

From: Barry Margolin (barmar_at_alum.mit.edu)
Date: 04/10/05 

Date: Sun, 10 Apr 2005 16:01:48 -0400

In article <slrnd5j0ej.2lp.bevakupf@myhome.net>,
 "Bev A. Kupf" <bevakupf@myhome.net> wrote:

> On Sun, 10 Apr 2005 21:13:03 +0200,
> Bodo Eggert (7eggert@7eggert.dyndns.org) wrote:
> >
> > see man shred.
>
> Unfortunately GNU shred is not on this system.
>
> Beverly

So download it. Assuming it doesn't require special privileges, you
should be able to run it out of your own account.

Anyway, what you probably should do is overwrite each file in the
hierarchy with as many bytes from /dev/random as there were in the
original file. In traditional filesystems, overwriting a file reuses
its disk blocks. This should be good enough for non-military-level
security needs.

I think it should be easy to write a perl script that accomplishes this. 

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar@alum.mit.edu
Arlington, MA
*** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me ***

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