shred(1) — Linux manual page

NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | AUTHOR | REPORTING BUGS | COPYRIGHT | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON

SHRED(1)                      User Commands                     SHRED(1)

NAME         top

       shred - overwrite a file to hide its contents, and optionally
       delete it

SYNOPSIS         top

       shred [OPTION]... FILE...

DESCRIPTION         top

       Overwrite the specified FILE(s) repeatedly, in order to make it
       harder for even very expensive hardware probing to recover the
       data.

       If FILE is -, shred standard output.

       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 (3)

       --random-source=FILE
              get random bytes from FILE

       -s, --size=N
              shred this many bytes (suffixes like K, M, G accepted)

       -u     deallocate and remove file after overwriting

       --remove[=HOW]
              like -u but give control on HOW to delete;  See below

       -v, --verbose
              show progress

       -x, --exact
              do not round file sizes up to the next full block;

              this is the default for non-regular files

       -z, --zero
              add a final overwrite with zeros to hide shredding

       --help display this help and exit

       --version
              output version information and exit

       Delete FILE(s) if --remove (-u) is specified.  The default is not
       to remove the files because it is common to operate on device
       files like /dev/hda, and those files usually should not be
       removed.  The optional HOW parameter indicates how to remove a
       directory entry: 'unlink' => use a standard unlink call.  'wipe'
       => also first obfuscate bytes in the name.  'wipesync' => also
       sync each obfuscated byte to the device.  The default mode is
       'wipesync', but note it can be expensive.

       CAUTION: shred assumes the file system and hardware overwrite
       data in place.  Although this is common, many platforms operate
       otherwise.  Also, backups and mirrors may contain unremovable
       copies that will let a shredded file be recovered later.  See the
       GNU coreutils manual for details.

AUTHOR         top

       Written by Colin Plumb.

REPORTING BUGS         top

       GNU coreutils online help:
       <https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/>
       Report any translation bugs to
       <https://translationproject.org/team/>

COPYRIGHT         top

       Copyright © 2024 Free Software Foundation, Inc.  License GPLv3+:
       GNU GPL version 3 or later <https://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.
       This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute
       it.  There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

SEE ALSO         top

       Full documentation <https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/shred>
       or available locally via: info '(coreutils) shred invocation'

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the coreutils (basic file, shell and text
       manipulation utilities) project.  Information about the project
       can be found at ⟨http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/⟩.  If you
       have a bug report for this manual page, see
       ⟨http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/⟩.  This page was obtained
       from the tarball coreutils-9.5.tar.xz fetched from
       ⟨http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/⟩ on 2024-06-14.  If you
       discover any rendering problems in this HTML version of the page,
       or you believe there is a better or more up-to-date source for
       the page, or you have corrections or improvements to the
       information in this COLOPHON (which is not part of the original
       manual page), send a mail to [email protected]

GNU coreutils 9.5              March 2024                       SHRED(1)

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