secure deletion

[Thomas Valentino Crimi]

Excerpts from mail: 21-May-99 Re: secure deletion by Eivind Eklund at FreeBSD.OR 
> Either tunefs or chflags - it would be relatively expensive, so if you
> only need it for some data, it is probably better to have more
> fine-grained control than per-FS.

  Might I also suggest a 'normal' user option for one particular file to
be securely wiped?  Myself I usea simple replacement for rm I call wipe.
 It overwrites, fsyncs, overwrites again with the 10101, 01010 pattern,
zero's out the file, renames it to a random direntry and then unlinks
(whoa..  talk about what would happen to hardlinks :).  As an extra
opton to rm, for a user to be able to tell the kernel to securely delet
a file even though it isn't routinely flagged for it (having to chflags
then rm for each case is rather silly, although rm -w or something
should do it for you).

  BTW, might I taek it thatwith the kernel deletion method, a warning
should occur if you attemp to delete  a secure file which still has a
hardlink to it. 

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