-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 According to NightStrike on 9/20/2008 9:28 AM: > On Sat, Sep 20, 2008 at 10:28 AM, James Youngman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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 [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (Cygwin) Comment: Public key at home.comcast.net/~ericblake/eblake.gpg Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iEYEARECAAYFAkjVGC0ACgkQ84KuGfSFAYB8/QCgtOPD9I//h4wWNOH/GuhghGjx b9MAn1W+hRfktJZdjOroFpOq1/aSSEEh =Qz79 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list Bug-coreutils@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
