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Re: Shred and symbolic links. People use it like a safer "rm" and get...


From: Eric Blake
Subject: Re: Shred and symbolic links. People use it like a safer "rm" and get...
Date: Sat, 20 Sep 2008 09:35:12 -0600
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According to NightStrike on 9/20/2008 9:28 AM:
> On Sat, Sep 20, 2008 at 10:28 AM, James Youngman <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Interesting points, thanks!
>>
>> Since shred cannot do anything useful with a symbolic link there are
>> only two (no, three) possible courses of action:
> 
> So you can't actually shred a symbolic link?

How?  You can unlink() the symlink, and create a new one by the same name,
but it is most likely that the new symlink() call will occupy a different
inode, so you aren't overwriting the disk contents of the old inode.  So
there's no point in even trying anything beyond the unlink().  Contrast
that with regular files, where with older file systems, operations that do
not change the inode will still go to the same disk location.  But re-read
the documentation of shred - on newer file systems and disk technologies,
it is often the case that 'overwriting' data is implemented by using
different disk locations, in which case shred _still_ isn't shredding the
sensitive disk contents.

- --
Don't work too hard, make some time for fun as well!

Eric Blake             address@hidden
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