What Is Shred Command Linux?

shred is a command on Unix-like operating systems that can be used to securely delete files and devices so that it is extremely difficult to recover them, even with specialized hardware and technology; assuming it’s even possible to recover the file at all. It is a part of GNU Core Utilities.

How do you shred a file in Linux?

To shred a single file, we can use the following command. The options we are using are: u: Deallocate and remove the file after overwriting. v: Verbose option, so that shred tells us what it is doing.

Why is the shred command necessary?

So, in order to delete a file completely from hard disk “shred” is used in Linux. This command overwrites the contents of a file multiple times, using patterns chosen to maximize the destruction of the residual data, making it harder for even very expensive hardware probing to recover it.