26Aug/090
Securely delete files in linux
I often use shred in linux, when deleting anything sensitive. Any way I've used it has always been pretty simple and straight forward (ie shred -uvz filename). Today I sold my old cell phone with microSD card on eBay and I wanted to get all of my data off securely. Unfortunately, it seems shred does not know how to handle directories. A little googling found me this:
find -type f -execdir shred -uvz '{}' \;
The find command lists every file in your present working directory and subdirectories and executes the shred command on it. I finished up with an rm -rf * to delete any remaining directories and I was then comfortable sending the card out with the phone.