The message 48E62FAD.9080704@tiscali.co.uk from Barrys linux mail bazubuntumail@tiscali.co.uk contains these words:
Hi. As I am in the process of moving completely from xp to Ubuntu Linux I wondered if there is a Linux alternative for my windows file shredder software ( which will overwrite files several times to make them unrecoverable). as I have been stumped on replacing this program which I value greatly as a security item.
Lifted from a post in one of the Zetnet newsgroups:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda
but from the point of view of getting rid of data, it'd be better to run
dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/hda
a few times (for suitable value of "few"), to repeatedly overwrite with random bits instead.
Comment:
Actually, you'd use /dev/urandom rather than /dev/random, as the latter doesn't yield much in the way of data before stopping (waiting for more randomness to happen).