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NewsaHackOyesterday at 5:16 PM6 repliesview on HN

In the intentionally dropped section, it lists shed as "Not particularly useful on Windows." Does anyone know why? Is thre already a shred-like command in Windows?


Replies

Octoth0rpeyesterday at 8:36 PM

The one in that section that kills me is the lack of `uname`. So you build a bunch of posix-compatible stuff, note that some things will be missing and some work slightly differently. It sure would be nice if we had a standard way of telling which kind of system you were on then, WOULDN'T IT?? (a very common use case for uname)

Dwedityesterday at 6:25 PM

Shred isn't very useful on SSDs in general. Because of TRIM, deleting a file instantly makes the sectors read back as 00 bytes. (Yes the data is technically still on the flash chips scattered across memory blocks without any mapping telling you where each piece of the data is, but is not readable through normal drive commands)

neskorodevyesterday at 5:24 PM

From shred man:

The shred command relies on a crucial assumption: that the file system and hardware overwrite data in place.

...

many modern file system designs do not satisfy this assumption. Exceptions include:

...

Log-structured or journaled file systems, such as.

...

NTFS.

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ChocolateGodyesterday at 5:23 PM

I assume it requires something exposed by the underlying filesystem.

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