Hide

What's this?

commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again.

Delete that bloated snippets file you've been using and share your personal repository with the world. That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on, discussed and voted up or down.

If you have a new feature suggestion or find a bug, please get in touch via http://commandlinefu.uservoice.com/

Get involved!

You can sign-in using OpenID credentials, or register a traditional username and password.

OpenID
or
Sign in Register

First-time OpenID users will be automatically assigned a username which can be changed after signing in.

Hide

Stay in the loop…

Follow the Tweets.

Every new command is wrapped in a tweet and posted to Twitter. Following the stream is a great way of staying abreast of the latest commands. For the more discerning, there are Twitter accounts for commands that get a minimum of 3 and 10 votes - that way only the great commands get tweeted.

» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu3
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu10

Subscribe to the feeds.

Use your favourite RSS aggregator to stay in touch with the latest commands. There are feeds mirroring the 3 Twitter streams as well as for virtually every other subset (users, tags, functions,…):

Subscribe to the feed for:

Hide

News

2011-03-12 - Confoo 2011 presentation
Slides are available from the commandlinefu presentation at Confoo 2011: http://presentations.codeinthehole.com/confoo2011/
2011-01-04 - Moderation now required for new commands
To try and put and end to the spamming, new commands require moderation before they will appear on the site.
2010-12-27 - Apologies for not banning the trolls sooner
Have been away from the interwebs over Christmas. Will be more vigilant henceforth.
2010-09-24 - OAuth and pagination problems fixed
Apologies for the delay in getting Twitter's OAuth supported. Annoying pagination gremlin also fixed.
Hide

Tags

Hide

Functions

Hide

Credits

Site by David Winterbottom (user root).

Securely destroy data on given device

Terminal - Securely destroy data on given device
# for i in $(seq 1 25); do dd if=/dev/urandom of=<your disk> bs=1M ; done
2009-09-29 07:12:34
User: danam
Functions: dd seq
3
Up
Down
Securely destroy data on given device

Intentional hash in the beginning. May run a looong time. Wipes your data for real. Was meant to be /dev/urandom - I mistyped it. :-)

Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Know a better way?

If you can do better, submit your command here.

What others think

Wiping data multiple times is not necessary to be secure (http://www.h-online.com/news/Secure-deletion-a-single-overwrite-will-do-it--/112432).

So one time overwriting need less time and is secure enough.

Maybe random data could improve the security a bit further.

dd if=/dev/urandom of=<your disk> bs=1M

Or, if you guarantee to generate enough entropy on your system during the whole wiping process, an even more secure way:

dd if=/dev/random of=<your disk> bs=1M
Comment by Marco 189 weeks and 4 days ago

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/disk bs=2M conv=fdatasync

is good enough on modern disks, and much faster. In fact some drives have an inbuilt 'secure erase' feature which does almost exactly the same thing (in addition the 'secure erase' also overwrites any unused reallocated bad blocks)

Comment by Escher 189 weeks and 3 days ago

"conf=fdatasync"

Comment by linuxrawkstar 189 weeks and 3 days ago

Your point of view

You must be signed in to comment.

Related sites and podcasts