shred overwrites devices or files, to help prevent even very expensive hardware from recovering the data.
Ordinarily when you remove a file (see rm invocation), the data is not actually destroyed. Only the index listing where the file is stored is destroyed, and the storage is made available for reuse. There are undelete utilities that will attempt to reconstruct the index and can bring the file back if the parts were not reused.
On a busy system with a nearly-full drive, space can get reused in a few seconds. But there is no way to know for sure. If you have sensitive data, you may want to be sure that recovery is not possible by actually overwriting the file with non-sensitive data.
However, even after doing that, it is possible to take the disk back to a laboratory and use a lot of sensitive (and expensive) equipment to look for the faint “echoes” of the original data underneath the overwritten data. If the data has only been overwritten once, it's not even that hard.
The best way to remove something irretrievably is to destroy the media it's on with acid, melt it down, or the like. For cheap removable media like floppy disks, this is the preferred method. However, hard drives are expensive and hard to melt, so the shred utility tries to achieve a similar effect non-destructively.
This uses many overwrite passes, with the data patterns chosen to maximize the damage they do to the old data. While this will work on floppies, the patterns are designed for best effect on hard drives. For more details, see the source code and Peter Gutmann's paper Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory, from the proceedings of the Sixth USENIX Security Symposium (San Jose, California, July 22–25, 1996).
Please note that shred relies on a very important assumption: that the file system overwrites data in place. This is the traditional way to do things, but many modern file system designs do not satisfy this assumption. Exceptions include:
data=journal
mode),
BFS, NTFS, etc. when they are configured to journal data.
In the particular case of ext3 file systems, the above disclaimer applies (and
shred is thus of limited effectiveness) only in data=journal
mode, which journals file data in addition to just metadata. In both
the data=ordered
(default) and data=writeback
modes,
shred works as usual. Ext3 journaling modes can be changed
by adding the data=something
option to the mount options for a
particular file system in the /etc/fstab file, as documented in
the mount man page (man mount).
If you are not sure how your file system operates, then you should assume that it does not overwrite data in place, which means that shred cannot reliably operate on regular files in your file system.
Generally speaking, it is more reliable to shred a device than a file, since this bypasses the problem of file system design mentioned above. However, even shredding devices is not always completely reliable. For example, most disks map out bad sectors invisibly to the application; if the bad sectors contain sensitive data, shred won't be able to destroy it.
shred makes no attempt to detect or report this problem, just as it makes no attempt to do anything about backups. However, since it is more reliable to shred devices than files, shred by default does not truncate or remove the output file. This default is more suitable for devices, which typically cannot be truncated and should not be removed.
Finally, consider the risk of backups and mirrors. File system backups and remote mirrors may contain copies of the file that cannot be removed, and that will allow a shredded file to be recovered later. So if you keep any data you may later want to destroy using shred, be sure that it is not backed up or mirrored.
shred [option]... file[...]
The program accepts the following options. Also see Common options.
You might use the following command to erase all trace of the file system you'd created on the floppy disk in your first drive. That command takes about 20 minutes to erase a “1.44MB” (actually 1440 KiB) floppy.
shred --verbose /dev/fd0
Similarly, to erase all data on a selected partition of your hard disk, you could give a command like this:
shred --verbose /dev/sda5
On modern disks, a single pass should be adequate, and it will take one third the time of the default three-pass approach.
# 1 pass, write pseudo-random data; 3x faster than the default shred --verbose -n1 /dev/sda5
To be on the safe side, use at least one pass that overwrites using pseudo-random data. I.e., don't be tempted to use ‘-n0 --zero’, in case some disk controller optimizes the process of writing blocks of all zeros, and thereby does not clear all bytes in a block. Some SSDs may do just that.
A file of ‘-’ denotes standard output. The intended use of this is to shred a removed temporary file. For example:
i=$(mktemp) exec 3<>"$i" rm -- "$i" echo "Hello, world" >&3 shred - >&3 exec 3>-
However, the command ‘shred - >file’ does not shred the contents of file, since the shell truncates file before invoking shred. Use the command ‘shred file’ or (if using a Bourne-compatible shell) the command ‘shred - 1<>file’ instead.
An exit status of zero indicates success, and a nonzero value indicates failure.