thc-secure-delete ( anybody installed it ? )

[Lee Braiden]

On Friday 02 September 2005 22:30, R.L. Reingard wrote:
> dd if=/dev/zero of=~/myhugefile bs=1M count=`expr 1024 \* 5`
>
> the whole command means counting bytes for blocks, and the digit '5' would
> be the 5GB i did mention before?


if = input file.  /dev/zero means to read the data from a special device that 
just produces zeros.

of = the file to write, of course

bs = block size (1Meg in this case)

count = total number of blocks to write.  1024 * 5 * 1M = 5G

Have a look at man dd, too.

> does this come to a stress point for the machine/system if this is the
> full space left on the disk, or is the system able to handle the work?

I've heard that unix programs don't handle full disks well, so yes, it's 
possible that bad things can happen here.  But if you don't run a mailserver, 
and disable any automatic mail fetching, you should be OK for the time it 
takes to wipe the space.  There's really no reason that programs shouldn't 
handle it just fine.  KMail is the only program I know of that REALLY doesn't 
like having no disk space available.

You *could* install THC if you want, and use the wipe utility, though; no real 
reason not to :)

-- 
Lee Braiden
http://www.DigitalUnleashed.com
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