secure file deletion

[Andrew McDonald]

On Thu, Feb 15, 2001 at 07:24:43PM +0100, Johan Lundberg wrote:
> 
> Another interesting thing partly related to this (or call it off-topic):
> Has anybody used the s-bit (not sticky!) with ext2/chattr? From the
> chattr man-page:
> 
> - When  a  file  with the `s' attribute set is deleted, its blocks are
> - zeroed and written back to the disk.
> 
> I have tried it, but it does not seem to work. Anybody? How is wiping and/
> or clearing handled in Reiser / ext3 or whatever they are called?

This was implemented in ext2, but removed somewhere in 1.3.x kernels
IIRC. I believe it was removed due to some nasty race conditions that
couldn't be easily resolved at the time.


Andrew
-- 
Andrew McDonald
E-mail: andrew@mcdonald.org.uk
http://www.mcdonald.org.uk/andrew/