.\" Hey, EMACS: -*- nroff -*- .\" +---------- .\" | .\" | GITWIPE man page .\" | .\" | Copyright 1993-1999,2006-2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc. .\" | .\" | This file is part of GNUIT (GNU Interactive Tools) .\" | .\" | GNUIT is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under .\" | the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free .\" | Software Foundation; either version 3, or (at your option) any later .\" | version. .\" | .\" | GNUIT is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY .\" | WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS .\" | FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more .\" | details. .\" | .\" | You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along .\" | with GNUIT; see the file COPYING. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/ .\" | .\" First parameter, NAME, should be all caps .\" Second parameter, SECTION, should be 1-8, maybe w/ subsection .\" other parameters are allowed: see man(7), man(1) .TH GITWIPE 1 "Sep 30, 2007" .\" Please adjust this date whenever revising the manpage. .\" .\" Some roff macros, for reference: .\" .nh disable hyphenation .\" .hy enable hyphenation .\" .ad l left justify .\" .ad b justify to both left and right margins .\" .nf disable filling .\" .fi enable filling .\" .br insert line break .\" .sp insert n+1 empty lines .\" for manpage-specific macros, see man(7) .SH NAME gitwipe \- An utility for wiping files .SH SYNOPSIS .B gitwipe .I "file ..." .SH DESCRIPTION This manual page documents briefly the .B gitwipe command. \fBgitwipe\fP is an utility for wiping files. It overwrites the file contents with a random sequence of numbers and then calls `sync'(). .PP Note that \fBgitwipe\fP does \fBnot\fP remove the wiped file since (under `Linux' at least) the `sync'() system call might return before actually writing the new file contents to disk. Removing the file might be dangerous because some file systems can detect that the blocks in the removed wiped file are no longer used and never write them back to disk in order to improve performance. It is up to you to remove the file(s) at a later moment. .PP .B gitwipe is part of the GNU Interactive Tools. .SH SEE ALSO .BR gitfm (1) .PP \fBgitwipe\fP and \fBgitfm\fP are documented fully by .IR "GNU Interactive Tools" , available via the Info system. .SH BUGS Please send bug reports to: .br .I gnuit-dev@gnu.org .SH AUTHORS .I Tudor Hulubei .br .I Andrei Pitis .br .I Ian Beckwith (Current maintainer)