wipe is a little command for securely erasing files from magnetic media. It compiles under various unix platforms, including Linux 2. * , (Open, Net, Free)BSD, aix 4.1, SunOS 5.5.1, Solaris 2.6. wipe is released under the GPL. Pre-compiled packages are available on most Linux distributions. Under Debian, the package name is wipe .

Source code

Under Ubuntu or Debian, just do apt-get source wipe .

I am currently hosting wipe at github :

You can browse the repository at http://github.com/berke/wipe/tree/master
Or you can get a local copy with git clone git://github.com/berke/wipe.git

Versions:

Version 0.22: (latest) wipe-0.22.tar.gz . The archive has a MD5 of d5e0b2cdea9846f370f3b3f3b91fd593 .
Version 0.20: wipe-0.20.tar.gz . The archive has a MD5 of dbf3027f46d014dc899a1cdf2ed93d00
Version 0.18: wipe-0.18.tar.gz . The archive has a MD5 of a4aef017cd32637042ae52ed4f986ced .

There are things you'd better wipe... before they get you.

Contributors

Over the years many people have sent in bug reports or patches. Many thanks to them. They are:

Jason Axley
Alexey Marinichev
Chris L. Mason
Karako Miklos
Jim Paris
Thomas Schoepf

Hopefully I haven't forgotten any.

Misc

You can read the english man page . You can also read Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory also available in the latest wipe tarball.