In today's day and age, personal privacy is becoming more and more important.  As everyone is keeping extremely personal, and sometimes confidential documentation on their computers.  Laptop theft is at an all time high and anyone with access to a search engine and ten minutes of free time can successfully recover any deleted file.

i am not a Mac user so i won't comment on any Mac tools, but hopefully someone else will know of one.

For windows users ( anyone using an NTFS partition ) can use the cipher tool that is packaged with all windows versions as of XP ( http://support.microsoft.com/kb/814599 ).  You can run cipher /? from a windows command terminal to get more information

For Linux users, there is a nice tool called shred ( http://linux.about.com/library/cmd/blcmdl1_shred.htm)

i've created an alias like this

alias shred='shred -n 35 -z -u -v'

the -n means it will overwrite the file 35 times

the -z means it will write a final set of zeros( 0 ) to hide the shredding

the -u remove the file and it's node handle after shredding

the -v means verbose, it prints detailed output as its executing.

Hopefully this will help those who want to securely and safely delete a file to prevent someone from reading it.

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