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Operating Systems AIX How to use dd command to erase the data in disk Post 302475152 by Corona688 on Friday 26th of November 2010 05:47:37 PM
Old 11-26-2010
Shredding perfectly good disks is a waste of hardware and probably a warranty violation. Smilie I vaguely remember a warranty disagreement between Dell and the US military... They could hardly return the machines intact after they'd used them. They came to a rather Pyrrhic compromise: Dell got the drives back, but didn't get their platters!

It of course depends on your security standards but a simple dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/disk will wreck the data badly enough that you'd need to hire cleanroom spacesuit people and their special machine to have any hope of retrieving it. With 7 overwrites, not even that.

The shred utility I mentioned earlier does that kind of destructive overwrite at the file level, on filesystems that support it, letting you securely delete a file without needing to reformat. Of course that's no guarantee there's nothing unwanted in unlinked sectors somewhere.

Last edited by Corona688; 11-27-2010 at 02:09 AM.. Reason: /dev/zero, not /dev/null
 

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curs_clear(3)						     Library Functions Manual						     curs_clear(3)

NAME
curs_clear, clear, wclear, erase, werase, clrtobot, wclrtobot, clrtoeol, wclrtoeol - Clear all or part of a Curses window SYNOPSIS
#include <curses.h> int clear( void ); int wclear( WINDOW *win ); int erase( void ); int werase( WINDOW *win ); int clrtobot( void ); int wclrtobot( WINDOW *win ); int clrtoeol( void ); int wclrtoeol( WINDOW *win ); LIBRARY
Curses Library (libcurses) STANDARDS
Interfaces documented on this reference page conform to industry standards as follows: clear, wclear, erase, werase, clrtobot, wclrtobot, clrtoeol, wclrtoeol: XCURSES4.2 Refer to the standards(5) reference page for more information about industry standards and associated tags. DESCRIPTION
The erase and werase routines copy blanks to every position in the window. The clear and wclear routines are similar to erase and werase but also call clearok. The result is that the screen is cleared completely on the next call to wrefresh for that window and repainted from scratch. The clrtobot and wclrtobot routines erase all lines below the cursor in the window. In addition, these routines erase the current line to the right of the cursor, including the character on which the cursor is positioned. The clrtoeol and wclrtoeol routines erase the current line to the right of the cursor, including the character on which the cursor is posi- tioned. NOTES
The header file <curses.h> automatically includes the header file <stdio.h>. Note that erase, werase, clear, wclear, clrtobot, and clrtoeol may be macros. RETURN VALUES
Upon successful completion, these routines return OK; otherwise, they return ERR. SEE ALSO
Functions: curses(3), curs_outopts(3), curs_refresh(3) Others: standards(5) curs_clear(3)
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