Re: Shred: Add recursion operations [PATCH]

[Bob Proulx]

Pádraig Brady wrote:
> Eric Blake wrote:
> > Amr Ali wrote:
> >> I'm not sure if this was discussed before, but I've got tired
> >> from having to work around the lack of native recursion within
> >> `shred`. So, attached is a patch to add recursion, including
> >> documentation.
> > 
> > Thanks for taking the effort to write a patch, but we probably won't
> > accept this upstream.
> 
> I agree.
> Also not that shred is of limited use with files,
> given that the info is probably spread elsewhere on
> the disk from moving files around, and temp files,
> and slop at the end of blocks, ...

I think perhaps that stronger warnings should be added to the
documentation that shred isn't appropriate for files on modern
journaling filesystems.  The very presence of shred leads people to
believe that it performs strong magic that it can't actually do.  Some
so much that they will submit patches (highly commendable btw, if
misguided in this particular case) to make it operate even more on
files.  We should be discouraging the use of shred on files rather
than encouraging it.

  http://stackoverflow.com/questions/913282/shred-doesnt-work-on-journaled-fs

Bob