Add shred to nautilus context menu.

[Ocky]

Ubuntu already has shred, but for convenience sake it can
be added to the nautilus context menu. To do this install
nautilus-actions (it can be found in Synaptic).
Can of course be used in the terminal where it's fun
to watch all the overwrites in action.
Good enough for home users wanting to securely delete
sensitive files.
See little gif for how to add to context menu.
(Of course you must select 'Add' in nautilus actions. I only selected 'Edit'
because I have already added it).
To shred a file:-
shred -f -v -z -u file.txt

-f: change permissions to allow writing if necessary
-v: verbose, to display the progress
-z: add a final overwrite with zeros to hide shredding
-u: truncate and remove file after overwriting

[Mrkvonic]

PM me mate, please ...
Mrk

[Ocky]

This PM stuff is new to me, but I have enabled it. Hope you like my gif ..
Nothing more in pipeline for now I'm afraid.
Regards.

[steve161]

There is a similar shred script at gnome-look.org that can be added to nautilus-actions. It also gives a warning and confirmation dialogue (good for absent-minded users or those whose mouse skills are on the sloppy side).

[Ocky]

Forgot to mention that as an alternative to dd command, you can also use shred to wipe the whole drive.
Eg. shred -verbose /dev/sda1
shred -vfz -n 5 /dev/sda1 ( shred will make 5 passes instead of the default 25, additionally overwriting the disk with zeroes -z, and changing permissions if necessary -f)

Haven't done this myself because I am pleased with the way things are.

Edit: You can try it with a floppy to see if it is up to scratch ... dev/fd0

[chronomatic]

Originally Posted by Ocky

Forgot to mention that as an alternative to dd command, you can also use shred to wipe the whole drive.
Eg. shred -verbose /dev/sda1
shred -vfz -n 5 /dev/sda1 ( shred will make 5 passes instead of the default 25, additionally overwriting the disk with zeroes -z, and changing permissions if necessary -f)

Haven't done this myself because I am pleased with the way things are.

Edit: You can try it with a floppy to see if it is up to scratch ... dev/fd0

Yep, I typically use shred instead of dd when wiping a hard drive. The only change I would make to your command is:

shred -vfz -n 1 /dev/sda

One pass is all that is needed to make data unrecoverable. Or, if you don't want zeroes, you can use random bits by using the "--random-source" flag.