UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello,

I was reading the manual on rm and it states that when you use 'rm' the files are usual recoverable, how is this done?

Does it assume that a backup system is in place?

Cheers

Jack

What OS are you using? The Solaris man page for rm does not even have the word 'recover' in there. And no, there are no assumptions in the man page.

using putty client to connect to a redhat server using the bash shell

Code:

 Note that if you use rm to remove a file, it is usually possible to recover the contents of that file.  If you want more assurance that
       the contents are truly unrecoverable, consider using shred.

OK, what they mean is that if someone really, really wants to get data from your disks, then they can even, if the file has been removed. This does not apply to casual users, but needs to be secured in an environment where confidentiality is a high priority (finance, defence, etc). And it does not mean that you can use an undelete a file.

The data can be read because only the inode entries for a file are removed, the data sectors allocated to it are still there on the disk. But to recover the data, you need to directly read the sectors from the disk and then try to make sense of them later.

Thanks for the info. So shred works by over writing the data and then removing it so even when still on disk but out of OS it can't be read in it's original form.

Cheers

J