Posted 08/04/2007 at 08:36:01pm

Be sure to read the man page before you breath a sigh of relief. Shred Does not work on modern journaling filesystems (ReiserFS, EXT3 in Journaling mode, XFS or JFS and a few others). It also doesnt work in some RAID situations or against files on NFS mount points. And many computer forensic folks will tsay the only way to make data unrecoverable permanently is to physically destroy the media it was written to. Against the casual thief shred will most likely fulfill your needs as long as you are not using one of the aforementioned filesystems. But against someone armed with knowledge of modern data recovery techniques shred is little more than a distraction.