bug#79108: Meta Re: pr lacks -p

On 2025-07-27 18:10, Stan Marsh wrote:
> Just out of curiosity, why is shred obsolete?

Oh, that's a long story. Some of it is covered in the manual here:

https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/shred-invocation.html

but that's a bit out of date. Here's something that's more up-to-date 
(though admittedly I haven't read it in detail):

Aronsson F, Lund O. Secure Data Deletion: Ensuring Confidentiality in 
Digital Systems – a survey of methods for data erasure. Master's thesis, 
Linköping U. 2025. 
https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1975833/FULLTEXT01.pdf

The bottom line is that you should not trust 'shred' to delete your data 
unless you know what you're doing (which most people don't). Or more 
concisely: although 'shred' was useful by default, now it isn't.