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obliterate(8)		  BSD System Manager's Manual		 obliterate(8)

NAME
     obliterate — scrub bits off magnetic media

SYNOPSIS
     obliterate [-fv] file [file...]

DESCRIPTION
     obliterate overwrites the named file[s] with a pattern designed to
     securely remove the data from the surface of most modern disk drives.

     The -f (force) option will obliterate files even if they are marked read-
     only, as long as they are owned by the user, or will allow overwriting of
     a character-special file, such as a raw disk device.  The -v (verbose)
     option causes obliterate to report on the progress in scrubbing and
     removing each file.  Specifying multiple -v options will make the program
     more vebose.  Currently, only two are useful.

BUGS
     obliterate does not control the cache on the disk drive, which may inter‐
     fere with the proper writing of the data to the physical media.  This
     program should disable the cache on the device if possible, but that is
     beyond the scope of the current development effort.

SEE ALSO
     rm(1), http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html

AUTHOR
     obliterate and this man page were written by Wes Peters <wes@soft‐
     weyr.com> for the FreeBSD Project.

     The data patterns used to overwrite the file[s] are taken from a paper
     entitled "Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory"
     by Peter Gutman of the Department of Computer Science, University of
     Auckland <pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz>.

HISTORY
     The obliterate command first appeared in FreeBSD 3.3.  It grew the abil‐
     ity to overwrite disk devices in FreeBSD 5.3, to scrub a disk clean for
     Rob Weinberg.

FreeBSD				  May 2, 1999			       FreeBSD

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