Securely remove files on Linux

When you delete a file with rm it's still possible to recover the file or parts of it. Use shred to overwrite the content of a file and delete it afterwards.

shred -u $file

Be aware that this is not sufficient for flash memory, like SSDs or USB pen drives. The write will possibly target another memory area than where the file was located previously. Prefer disk encryption whenever possible.

Erasing directories

To erase complete directory structures, using shred is cumbersome. Use wipe instead:

wipe -r directory

The above warning for flash drives applies for wipe as well.

Thomas Eisenbarth

makandra.de

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Last edit

Over 11 years ago

Keywords

erase, wipe

License

Source code in this card is licensed under the MIT License.

Recursively remove unnecessary executable-flags

Sometimes files attain executable-flags that they do not need, e.g. when your Windows VM copies them over a Samba share onto your machine.

From inside your Rails project directory call regularly:

geordi remove-executable-flags

Runs `chmod -...

jQuery: How to attach an event handler only once

With "attaching an event handler once" you possibly mean one of these two things:

Register a function for an event, and discard it once that event has happened

Use one instead of on.

$(element).one('eventName', function() { ... });

...

Don't forget: Automatically remove join records on has_many :through associations

Bad

# Given the following models

class Image < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :album_images
  has_many :albums, through: :album_images
end

class Album < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :album_images
  has_many :images, through: :album_i...

How to bind an event listener only once with Unpoly

You can use Unpoly's up.on with a named listener function and immediately unbind this event listener with { once: true }:

up.on('up:fragment:inserted', { once: true }, function () { ... })

In Unpoly 1 you c...

Posted by Thomas Eisenbarth to makandra dev (2011-02-18 17:02)

Securely remove files on Linux

Erasing directories

Related cards:

Be careful! The following solution will delete files on a volume. If you don't know exactly what you're doing, you can run into big trouble with your computer.

Register a function for an event, and discard it once that event has happened

Bad

Ubuntu >= 12.04

Be careful!
The following solution will delete files on a volume. If you don't know exactly what you're doing, you can run into big trouble with your computer.