Anyone here use SFILL (the program in the Secure Delete suite that overwrites free space within a Linux partition in order to securely overwrite deleted data) ?

I'm running it right now. It's burning my laptop CPU to kingdom come. Apparently it defaults to overwriting the free space 38 times! And using 100% of the CPU while doing it. It's been running for several hours, so I pointed a fan at it so the laptop doesn't melt. I'm afraid to interrupt the program in progress, as you know it's doing filesystem writes.

It looks like using the -l or -ll flags would cause fewer overwrites, but I can't tell for sure from the man page (doc). It doesn't give sufficient information.

Does anyone know?

Thank you for any feedback.

Well, I finally got tired of SFILL running. It was placing 1 asterisk up in a row every hour. My guess is that each represented 1 pass of over-writing the disk. Since the default is 38 passes, my guess is that this program would have run for 38 hours!

I CTRL-C'd out of it and fortunately it did no damage to the filesystem (did an fsck to make sure).

Next time I'll run it with the -ll flags and see if that speeds it up. The program seems to work great but unless I missed something the man page/doc is lacking basic info you need to run the program effectively.