Zack's Kernel News
Zack's Kernel News
Chronicler Zack Brown reports on the latest news, views, dilemmas, and developments within the Linux kernel community.
Permanent Deletion
Alexander Holler was unsatisfied with the way filesystems typically delete files. To save time, deleting a file typically means that the filesystem treats that range of data as available instead of in use. The problem with this approach is that there are relatively easy-to-use tools that some stranger might use to recover your private data after obtaining your hard drive. Alexander wanted to allow regular users to truly wipe their data off of storage media, rather than just have it *appear* to be gone.
Alexander's simple solution was to "overwrite the contents of a file by request from userspace. Filesystems do know where on the storage they have written the contents to, so why not just let them delete that stuff themselves instead."
He posted some patches, implementing a new system call that would delete files this way. Alan Cox, however, rained all over that parade. Alan said:
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