3.5 The GNUIT wipe file utility

gitwipe is an utility for wiping files. It overwrites the file contents with a random sequence of numbers and then calls ‘sync’().

Note that gitwipe does *not* remove the wiped file since (under Linux at least) the ‘sync’() system call might return before actually writing the new file contents to disk. Removing the file might be dangerous because some file systems can detect that the blocks in the removed wiped file are no longer used and never write them back to disk in order to improve performance. It is up to you to remove the file(s) at a later moment.

This document was generated by Ian Beckwith on March, 1 2009 using texi2html 1.78.