

Note: These following two tools ( sswap and sdmem) in the secure-deletetion toolkit are not directly relevant for the scope of this guide, however, we will explain them for knowledge purpose and future use. The are a few limitations of sfill that you can read about in the man page, where you can also find additional usage flags and instructions: $ man sfill The command below will execute sfill on my root partition, with the -v switch enabling verbose mode: $ sudo sfill -v /home/aaronkilik/tmp/Īssuming you created a separate partition, /home to store normal system users home directories, you can specify a directory on that partition to apply sfill on it: $ sudo sfill -v /home/username
LINUX FILE SHREDDER FREE
sfill checks the the free space on the specified partition and fills it with random data from / dev/urandom. Sfill is a part of secure-deletetion toolkit, is a secure free disk and inode space wiper, it deletes files on free disk space in a secure method. sfill -Secure Free Disk/Inode Space Wiper Read through the srm man page for more usage options and information: $ man srmĤ. -z – wipes the last write with zeros instead of random data.Once installed, you can use srm tool to remove files or directories securely on a Linux system as follows.
LINUX FILE SHREDDER INSTALL
Secure-delete is a collection of secure file deletion tools, that contains srm (secure_deletion) tool, which is used to remove files securely.įirst you need to install it using the relevant command below: $ sudo apt-get install secure-delete Read through the wipe man page for additional usage options and instructions: $ man wipe Note: Wipe only works reliably on magnetic memory, therefore use the other methods for solid state disks (memory).

Shred overwrites a file to hide its contents, and can optionally delete it as well. In this article, we will explain a number of command line tools for permanently and securely deleting files in Linux. Suggested Read: 3 Ways to Delete All Files in a Directory Except One or Few FilesĪssuming a file contains classified or secret content such as usernames and passwords of a security system, an attacker with the necessary knowledge and skills can easily recover a deleted copy of the file and access these user credentials (and you can probably guess the aftermath of such as scenario). It can be recovered by data thieves, law enforcement or other threats. The file is simply hidden from users and it resides somewhere on the hard disk. In most cases the means we use to delete a file from our computers such as using Delete key, Trash files or rm command, which do not permanently and securely remove the file from the hard disk (or any storage media).
