On Wed, 2007-01-24 at 09:44 +0000, Darren J Moffat wrote:
> IMO shred as it appears in GNU coreutils is down right dangerous because
> it leads end users into a false sense of security and they need to know
> a huge amount of info about not only which filesystem they are using but
> how it is implemented.
It appears that the usage message and associated documentation for shred
already includes significant cautions of that form (I've looked at a
copy on the SWAN which identifies itself as version 5.0); the help
message in 5.0 also says:
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.
which suggests that the intended use is for devices, not files.
I think the appropriate action is to ensure the documentation and
messages are accurate rather than to remove it.
At a higher level I'm uncomfortable with the notion that we can say
we're integrating GNU coreutils if we're not providing the whole command
set.
- Bill
