SHRED(1)

💅 SHRED(1) — or, how to make your files actually gone 💖

okay so, bestie, this is the shred page from the General Commands Manual (yes that's the section, iykyk), and it's literally about nuking files so hard that not even the fancy hardware girlies can get them back. slay.

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✨ NAME ✨

shred — overwrite the specified FILE(s) repeatedly, so that it's harder for even very expensive hardware probing to recover the data. like, we're not just deleting, we're ✨obliterating✨.

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🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

shred [OPTION]... FILE...

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

Overwrite the specified FILE(s) repeatedly, in order to make it harder for even very expensive hardware probing to recover the data. that's it, that's the whole vibe. main character energy: destroy, don't just delete 💅

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🔥 OPTIONS 🔥

• -f, --force — change permissions so writing is actually allowed, if it's necessary. sometimes you gotta fight the filesystem for your rights, periodt.
• -n, --iterations <NUMBER> [default: 3] — overwrite N times instead of the default (3). more passes = more chaos = more slay 🔥
• -s, --size <N> — shred this many bytes. suffixes like K, M, G are accepted, so go off with your units, bestie.
• -u — deallocate and remove the file after overwriting. so it gets shredded and yeeted.
• --remove[=<HOW>] — like -u, but you get control over HOW to delete. see below 👇
  • possible values:
    • unlink
    • wipe
    • wipesync
• -v, --verbose — show progress. so you can watch the whole thing go down like it's a livestream 🫶
• -x, --exact — do not round file sizes up to the next full block. this is the default for non-regular files, just so you know 🌸
• -z, --zero — add a final overwrite with zeros to hide the shredding. sneaky, iconic, obsessed.
• --random-source — take random bytes from FILE. yes, that's the whole description, it's giving mysterious 💜
• -h, --help — print help
• -V, --version — print version
• [file] — the file(s), obviously 🍓

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👑 EXTRA 👑

Delete FILE(s) if --remove (-u) is specified. the default is not to remove the files, because it's super common to operate on device files like /dev/hda, and those files usually should not be removed. so please don't accidentally unalive your devices, ngl 🙈.

CAUTION: note that shred relies on a very important assumption: that the file system overwrites data in place. that's the traditional way to do things, but many modern file system designs do not satisfy this assumption. the following are examples of file systems where shred is not effective, or is not guaranteed to be effective in all file system modes:

• log-structured or journal file systems, such as those supplied with AIX and Solaris (and JFS, ReiserFS, XFS, Ext3, etc.)
• file systems that write redundant data and carry on even if some writes fail, such as RAID-based file systems
• file systems that make snapshots, such as Network Appliance's NFS server
• file systems that cache in temporary locations, such as NFS version 3 clients
• compressed file systems

in the case of ext3 file systems, the above disclaimer applies (and shred is thus of limited effectiveness) only in data=journal mode, which journals file data in addition to just metadata. in both the data=ordered (default) and data=writeback modes, shred works as usual. ext3 journal modes can be changed by adding the data=something option to the mount options for a particular file system in the /etc/fstab file, as documented in the mount man page (man mount) 🧚

in addition, file system backups and remote mirrors may contain copies of the file that cannot be removed, and that will allow a shredded file to be recovered later. so like... the file might still be out there living its best life in a backup, and there's literally nothing shred can do about it 😭💀

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⭐ VERSION ⭐

so true bestie, this is all from v(uutils coreutils) 0.12.0, dated 2026-09-17 — that's the source, the version, and the date, all in one cute lil sign-off 🫶 mwah, go shred responsibly ✨