obliterate(8) BSD System Manager's Manual obliterate(8)NAMEobliterate — scrub bits off magnetic media
SYNOPSISobliterate [-fv] file [file...]
DESCRIPTIONobliterate 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.
BUGSobliterate 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 ALSOrm(1), http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html
AUTHORobliterate 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