Hello,

I've got an interesting question. In the MS world, there is a setting to enable a user to clear the swap file at shutdown. Does anyone know how and if the swap file is cleared at shutdown and if not, how would one do that? Thanks.

well, first of all ther isn't a swap 'file' in linux it's another partition alltogeather so weather or not it gets cleared at shutdown or not is irrelivant because that space is never available to you in the first place

Well, yes, you are correct about what you said. I apologize, I was thinking of the paging "file" in windows. But whatever my use of words was, my question still stands. If the swap partition is used to write to when you run out of physical memory, how is it ever cleared since data is being written to the partition?

Unless you have small amount of ram, then you would hardly use much swap space.

On my system with 256mb of ram, I use maybe less then 200k of it! And I'm using KDE as a desktop environment along with about 4 or more windows open.

Thanks, because I do exactly the same. I run KDE and have a lot of windows open too.

Normally you can't 'read' the swap partition using conventional methods, because that space doesn't have a file system (It's just like a pile of RAM). The thing is that if someone gets his hands on your hdd, he could see some of the things stored in the swap... However, I doubt passwords are ever saved in the swap if you have plenty of RAM...

I think you might be able to read the swap as a binary file using the dd commands... I think I'll try it!

But I need some help... How do I tell dd to stop copying after the 1st MB? I was unable to convince it!