secure delete option? (aka pgp -w)

[Gaël Quéri]

On Fri, 25 Jun 1999, David Hayes wrote:

> On Fri, Jun 25, 1999 at 11:05:26AM -0700, Jason Axley wrote:
> > Are there plans to implement the equivalent functionality of the PGP
> > secure delete (wipe) option in GPG?  That's the one option that makes me
> > keep a copy of PGP around so that I can securely delete files.  Is this on
> > the plate to add to gnupg?
> 
> It's not necessary. There's a very nice program called Wipe that handles
> this. Unlike the Windows world, Unix people know how to use one program
> to do one job. There's no particular relationship between secure erasing
> and encryption. 
> 
> david[152]$ wipe -v
> wipe version 0.04, 06.08.1998 by Berke Durak <berke at gsu.linux.org.tr>
> Based on data from "Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and
> Solid-State Memory" by Peter Gutmann <pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz>

There is also shred in the latest versions of fileutils (those at
ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/fetish/)

It is also based on the same paper