| NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | AUTHOR | REPORTING BUGS | COPYRIGHT | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON | |
|  | 
SHRED(1)                      User Commands                      SHRED(1)
       shred - overwrite a file to hide its contents, and optionally
       delete it
       shred [OPTION]... FILE...
       Overwrite the specified FILE(s) repeatedly, in order to make it
       harder for even very expensive hardware probing to recover the
       data.
       If FILE is -, shred standard output.
       Mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short
       options too.
       -f, --force
              change permissions to allow writing if necessary
       -n, --iterations=N
              overwrite N times instead of the default (3)
       --random-source=FILE
              get random bytes from FILE
       -s, --size=N
              shred this many bytes (suffixes like K, M, G accepted)
       -u     deallocate and remove file after overwriting
       --remove[=HOW]
              like -u but give control on HOW to delete;  See below
       -v, --verbose
              show progress
       -x, --exact
              do not round file sizes up to the next full block; this is
              the default for non-regular files
       -z, --zero
              add a final overwrite with zeros to hide shredding
       --help display this help and exit
       --version
              output version information and exit
       Delete FILE(s) if --remove (-u) is specified.  The default is not
       to remove the files because it is common to operate on device
       files like /dev/hda, and those files usually should not be
       removed.  The optional HOW parameter indicates how to remove a
       directory entry: 'unlink' => use a standard unlink call.  'wipe'
       => also first obfuscate bytes in the name.  'wipesync' => also
       sync each obfuscated byte to the device.  The default mode is
       'wipesync', but note it can be expensive.
       CAUTION: shred assumes the file system and hardware overwrite data
       in place.  Although this is common, many platforms operate
       otherwise.  Also, backups and mirrors may contain unremovable
       copies that will let a shredded file be recovered later.  See the
       GNU coreutils manual for details.
       Written by Colin Plumb.
       GNU coreutils online help:
       <https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/>
       Report any translation bugs to
       <https://translationproject.org/team/>
       Copyright © 2025 Free Software Foundation, Inc.  License GPLv3+:
       GNU GPL version 3 or later <https://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.
       This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
       There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
       Full documentation <https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/shred>
       or available locally via: info '(coreutils) shred invocation'
       This page is part of the coreutils (basic file, shell and text
       manipulation utilities) project.  Information about the project
       can be found at ⟨http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/⟩.  If you
       have a bug report for this manual page, see
       ⟨http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/⟩.  This page was obtained
       from the tarball coreutils-9.7.tar.xz fetched from
       ⟨http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/⟩ on 2025-08-11.  If you
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       send a mail to man-pages@man7.org
GNU coreutils 9.7               April 2025                       SHRED(1)
Pages that refer to this page: rm(1), logrotate(8)