obliterate(8) System Manager's Manual obliterate(8) NAME obliterate -- scrub bits off magnetic media SYNOPSIS obliterate [-fv] file [file...] DESCRIPTION obliterate overwrites the named file[s] with a pattern designed to securely remove the data from the surface of most modern disk drives. The -f (force) option will obliterate files even if they are marked read- only, as long as they are owned by the user, or will allow overwriting of a character-special file, such as a raw disk device. The -v (verbose) option causes obliterate to report on the progress in scrubbing and removing each file. Specifying multiple -v options will make the program more vebose. Currently, only two are useful. BUGS obliterate does not control the cache on the disk drive, which may inter- fere with the proper writing of the data to the physical media. This pro- gram should disable the cache on the device if possible, but that is beyond the scope of the current development effort. SEE ALSO rm(1), http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html AUTHOR obliterate and this man page were written by Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com> for the FreeBSD Project. The data patterns used to overwrite the file[s] are taken from a paper en- titled "Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory" by Peter Gutman of the Department of Computer Science, University of Auckland <pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz>. HISTORY The obliterate command first appeared in FreeBSD 3.3. It grew the ability to overwrite disk devices in FreeBSD 5.3, to scrub a disk clean for Rob Weinberg. FreeBSD May 2, 1999 obliterate(8)
NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | BUGS | SEE ALSO | AUTHOR | HISTORY
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