This document is a WORK IN PROGRESS.
This is just a quick personal cheat sheet: treat its contents with caution!

Shred¶

shred overwrites a file to hide its contents, and optionally delete it.

When deleting a file from Linux (or from any OS), the file is generally not deleted permanently from the hard disk. It first gets moved to the trash, and even after emptying the trash: the file is still there in the hard drive and could be recovered. Indeed, only the pointer - pointing to the file location - is cleared, so the associated data space is considered unallocated (free space) but can be recovered easily.

The file gets permanently deleted when the OS writes over the data space of the file which was considered as unallocated. So, in order to delete a file completely from hard disk, shred can be used. This command overwrites the contents of a file multiple times, using patterns chosen to maximize the destruction of the residual data, making it harder for even very expensive hardware probing to recover it.

Reference(s)

Install¶

shred is part of the GNU Core Utilities, so it should be installed by default. You can check it by running $ shred --version.

Use¶

overwrite the contents of the file multiple times (by default 3 times with random content, in order to make it almost unrecoverable), it will change the file data in such a way that it would be really hard to get the old file back:
```
$ shred filename.txt
```
> Note: after running this command filename.txt will still exist, but it's content will be > overwritten.

overwrite and delete the file as well:

$ shred -u filename.txt # -u or --remove

overwrite, change the number of times a file is to be overwritten (e.g. 10 times), and delete the file:
```
$ shred -n 10 -u filename.txt # -n or --iterations
```
overwrite only the first bytes (e.g. 5 first bytes), some specific bytes of text only:
```
$ shred -s 5 filename.txt # -s or --size
```
> Note: after running this command filename.txt will still exist, and only the first 5 > bytes will be overwritten.

One can also the size in Kilo-bytes (K), Mega-bytes (M), or Giga-bytes (G), e.g. $ shred -s 5M.
run shred in "verbose" mode, in order to print how many times the file is overwritten (and print when it is deleted if specifying -u / --remove):
```
$ shred -v filename.txt # -v or --verbose
```
run shred in "force" mode, in order to change permissions to allow writing if necessary:
```
$ shred -f filename.txt # -f or --force
```
overwrite, change the number of times a file is to be overwritten (e.g. 10 times), delete the file, and add final overwrite with zeros in order to hide shredding:
```
$ shred -n 10 -u -z filename.txt` # -z or --zero
```
print basic details and version of shred command:
```
$ shred -v # -v or --version
```

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