File shred

Command line utility that safely deletes files.

Functionality

• Repeatedly overwrite the file content with random data and specific patterns.
• Rename repeatedly to hide that the file ever existed.
• Remove access- and modification time.
• Truncate then delete the file.

In Docker

Run the shredder with Docker:

docker run --rm -it -v "$(pwd):/data" mverleg/file-shred -- file.txt

You can mount any directory in which you want to shred files; the above example uses the current directory $(pwd).

To build the image yourself (instead of downloading from Dockerhub), clone the Github project and run:

docker build -t mverleg/file-shred .

This will also run the tests and lints, to verify that your version is okay.

As binary

You can shred files like

shred file.txt image.png /tmp/stuff/*

There are command line options for various things::

Arguments:
<FILES>...  One or more paths to input files (absolute or relative)

Options:
-y, --no-confirm
        Delete files without asking for confirmation
-v, --debug
        Show debug information, especially on errors
-q, --quiet
        Do not show progress or other non-critical output
-k, --keep
        Destroy the data, but do not rename or delete the file. Useful for non-regular files like special system devices
--overwrite-count <OVERWRITE_COUNT>
        Number of times the file is overwritten (at least 1) [default: 10]
--rename-count <RENAME_COUNT>
        Number of times the file is renamed

As library

To use default options on a single file, ues shred_file. To customize:

• Create an instance of ::file_shred::ShredConfig, options largely correspond to the command-line ones.
• In particular note confirmation_prompt=false if there might not be an interactive session present.
• Call the ::file_shred::shred function and pass this config.

Keep in mind that:

There are no security guarantees, and the author is not a professional security expert. Use at your own risk.

• Obviously, be careful. The purpose of this tool is to irrecoverably delete data. I cannot help you get data back if you delete it by accident.
• Note that data recovery difficulty depends on the environment (operating system, hard disk formatting, physical medium). For some configurations, overwriting may not work.

This is used by file_endec.