It works fine on default EXT3. The only thing journaled is meta-data. You snipped that part out. More from man shred In the case of ext3 file systems, the abov

It works fine on default EXT3. The only thing journaled is meta-data. You snipped that part out. More from man shred In the case of ext3 file systems, the above disclaimer applies (and shred is thus of limited effectiveness) only in data=journal mode, which journals file data in addition to just metadata. In both the data=ordered (default) and data=writeback modes, shred works as usual.