Shred and symbolic links. People use it like a safer "rm" and get...

[Antonio]

Dear sirs:
        
(Excuse my English, thank you).
        
The other day I destroyed an important file using shred, so I finally wrote to 
this list hoping someone changes something to prevent people from having the 
same damage. 
        
Let's define some use cases:
        - Joe has a folder "questionable employees about the bookkeeping 
incident", 
and there some symbolic links pointing to "/data/John.txt", "/data/Mary.txt" 
and "/data/Jack.txt". Joe wants to shred the John link, not only delete it, 
since a symbolic link has information of its own (that is, that it points to 
John.txt and so John was a "questionable employee"). But not only Shred does 
not shred this information inside the symlink... also when he tries "shred 
John" he shreds "/data/John.txt", losing it.
        - Peter has been told that to delete safely  he can use shred instead 
of rm. 
He has a temporary copy of a folder, now he executes "shred *", like he does 
with "rm *" just to discover one day that in the files there was a symbolic 
link and he has shredded the original document.