The man page is correct about quite a few things, but it's also a bit sarcastic: The best way to sanitize a storage medium is to subject it to tempera-

The man page is correct about quite a few things, but it's also a bit sarcastic: The best way to sanitize a storage medium is to subject it to tempera- tures exceeding 1500K. As a cheap alternative, you might use wipe at your own risk. Be aware that it is very difficult to assess whether running wipe on a given file will actually wipe it -- it depends on an awful lot of factors, such as : the type of file system the file resides on (in particular, whether the file system is a journaling one or not), the type of storage medium used, and the least significant bit of the phase of the moon. But no matter what, wipe is a really great program.