shred program for ext3
 

From the shred man page:

CAUTION: Note that shred relies on a very important assumption: that
the filesystem overwrites data in place. This is the traditional way
to do things, but many modern filesystem designs do not satisfy this
assumption. The following are examples of filesystems on which shred
is not effective:

* log-structured or journaled filesystems, such as those supplied with

AIX and Solaris (and JFS, ReiserFS, XFS, etc.)


I'm using ext3. It is a journaled fs. How can I shred stuff?

Please send an answer quick. The FBI is coming!





-R

AFAIK, the only way to wipe files from a journalled filesystem is to wipe out the whole partition (e.g. dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda1).

A bit heavy handed. I just want to shred a couple of files. I'll keep that in mind though!

I've not really looked into this, but it seems possible to convert ext3 to ext2, remove the journal, shred the files, then do the -j thing again with mkfs.ext2 to get your ext3fs back.

NOTE: You might want to find out for sure if you can conver back to ext2 without destroyign files before making the change. I didn't read the man page recently.

maybe this would work

cd [sumwhere_where_quota's_arnt_used] (e.g. cd /usr/)

then delete the file's you want to shred
then...
yes "Nirvana Are the GREATEST BAND EVER" > BigFile

which will fill the free hard drive space with the repeated string above,

then delete the big_file

rm BigFile.

would that work ?????