Hi
2008/10/3 Anthony Anson tony.anson@zetnet.co.uk:
The message 48E62FAD.9080704@tiscali.co.uk from Barrys linux mail bazubuntumail@tiscali.co.uk contains these words:
Lifted from a post in one of the Zetnet newsgroups:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda
Which is OK if you want to nuke everything on the disk (or partition of you give it a partition number). But if you want to shred specific files... it won't do unless you call dd on each file (adjusting bs and count to match filesize).
but from the point of view of getting rid of data, it'd be better to run
dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/hda
Which is extremely slow (at least here...)
[srdjant@tigerclaw ~]$ dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/null bs=1M count=10 10+0 records in 10+0 records out 10485760 bytes (10 MB) copied, 2.50551 s, 4.2 MB/s
/dev/zero is much faster. You could do one pass of dding from /dev/zero, and then several passes of urandom (if you were that paranoid).
- Srdjan