It’s a universal truth that all PCs are slow. All of them, no matter the hardware, no matter the OS, they’re slow. The faster it goes, the faster we want it to go. It’s never enough.

We all know that when you simply delete a file it's possible to recover it later. Sometimes this is useful, if you accidentally delete something important; but most of the time this is a problem, and you really want that file gone forever. This howto will explain how to delete a file in linux securely and permanently, so it can never be recovered.

I recently read a doctorate’s thesis on file system robustness by Vijayan Prabhakaran from the University of Wisconsin. It’s very interesting, and may explain in part the recent ruckus on the LKML around file systems.