3 ms·

Looking at man shred, apparently one can shred stdout.

• emodendroket 10y ago
  Is there any advantage to specifically disabling that?
• gcr 10y ago
  Why not? One can shred any file descriptor. :-) I bet one could even shred a network socket.
• brudgers 10y ago
  "Shredding stdout" sounds like the highest complement for a command line utility.
• dTal 10y ago
  And yet it doesn't "work": dtal@reepicheep:~$ cat /dev/urandom | shred - shred: -: invalid file type
  • colanderman 10y ago
    Your command points stdin to the output of some random command. Even if you actually redirected stdout (pipe to cat, not from), it still wouldn't work, because cat's stdin isn't a file. You need to point stdout to an actual file, like this: shred > /my/secret/file.txt Why would you do this? At the end of a long batch of commands that all write to some temporary file opened on stdout. Not uncommon in shell-land.