[NBLUG/talk] shred questionj

[Walter Hansen]

Bill Kendrick wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 12, 2006 at 01:02:19PM -0700, jimbo wrote:
>> 	Which makes no sense to me. Why truncate the file AFTER it's been
>> shredded (or really deleted) and then remove it? Huh? Remove it? You mean,
>> like 'rm filename?'
> 
> Been a while since I used 'shred', but yeah, I believe so.
> 'shred' just leaves you with a file full of nonsense (which has usually been
> written over many times, as to make the data very-hard-to-retrieve).

It's so that you can use shred on filesystems:

shred /dev/hda1

there's a command line argument to delete the file after it's done, 
check the man page.