[Gllug] Wiping free space.

[general_email at technicalbloke.com]

I was wondering how one would go about overwriting empty space on a
standard ext3 partition. The quickest naive solution would seem to be to
pipe the output of /dev/random to a file until all the disk space is
used then delete it but...

a) I've heard bad things may happen if the system disk get completely
full on unix systems, and...

b) AFAIK, files are block aligned so files which don't divide perfectly
into the block size may have space at the very end of that the OS
doesn't regard as free.

Are the above conerns legitimate or just here-say? If the former are
there any apps I would find in the big 3 repos that overwrite unused
space while mitigating the above?


Roger.
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