shred – delete a file securely, first overwriting it to hide its contents
Overwrite the specified FILE(s) repeatedly, in order to make it harder for even very expensive hardware probing to recover the data.
Mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short options too.
- -f, –force
- change permissions to allow writing if necessary
- -n, –iterations=N
- Overwrite N times instead of the default (25)
- -s, –size=N
- shred this many bytes (suffixes like K, M, G accepted)
- -u, –remove
- truncate and remove file after overwriting
- -v, –verbose
- show progress
- -x, –exact
- do not round file sizes up to the next full block
- -z, –zero
- add a final overwrite with zeros to hide shredding
- –
- shred standard output
- –help
- display this help and exit
- –version
- output version information and exit
Use shred to overwrite a file to hide its contents, and optionally delete it.
shred is a program that will overwrite your files in a way that makes them very difficult to recover by a third party.