Shred

shred

shred is a command for destroying data. As contrast to rm, it does not remove a file, but it overwrites the content so often that you cannot recover it. shred will probably not completely destroy the data if you are using a journalled filesystem like JFS or ext3. Also, if you have a fault tolerant RAID array, it will not shred the data in the parity block / mirror drive.

Examples:

• shred a file

$ echo "Sensitive data" > file
$ cat file
Sensitive data
$ shred file
$ ls file
file
$ cat file
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$ rm file

• shred a hard disk

shred /dev/sdx

Provided by

Most (all?) Linux distributions incorporate this from the GNU Coreutils: man page

Related Commands

• cp - Copy files
• mv - Moves files
• rm - Removes files
• mkdir - Creates a directory
• dd - device-to-device copier
• install - Copy and set permissions