wipe
This command is in beta form. Available in command line form only (no GUI).
The wipe command wipes any mix of files and folders. There are two ways to invoke it:
- Invoked with no arguments. All local mounted volumes are searched for files and folders ending in “-wipeMe”
(simply rename any file or folder that one wishes to wipe to end in that suffix). - Invoked with one or more arguments that are paths to files or folders (any number and combination of files or folders).
The items to wipe are displayed, and as a precaution, a double affirmative confirmation is required before wiping (the user must type “yes” twice in order to proceed).
It is possible to defeat the warning/confirmation behvavior using the --nowarn and/or --volume options. These are not recommended for most users.
What happens
The wiping process is designed to obliterate as much as possible of the file and folders:
- For each file, the entire contents of the data fork is overwritten, rounded up to the nearest 4K block.
- For each file and folder, the name is obfuscated with a randomly chosen gibberish name.
- For each file the file info is overwritten by zeroes (file type, flags, Finder info, etc).
- Finally, the files and folders are deleted.
When wiping is done, the files and folders will be gone.
Caveats
The over-writing of file contents is subject to the following limitations:
- The contents (typically 16-20 bytes) of symbolic link files cannot be overwritten.
- Data forks only are processed; no support for old-style resource forks.
- The wipe command is not designed for military-grade multi-pass wipe. Such expectations demand destruction of the drive as well.
- Solid state drives operate such that overwriting files may still leave the file data elsewhere on disk; follow up file wiping with the wipeFree command to ensure that free space is also cleared.
- Multi-pass multi-pattern options are not offered; that type of wiping make sense only for low-level hardware wipes of the entire drive including metadata areas.
Command line usage
Lines that start with '#' are comments.
# search all local volumes for files and folders to wipe (ending in “-wipeMe”)
dgl wipe
# wipe (destroy) recursively all items in folder /Volumes/Master/Financials
dgl wipe /Volumes/Master/Financials
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