When you use the "rm" utility, you may think that you're deleting a file, but you're not. All you're doing is removing the file's index--or, inode number--from the hard drive. The file is still there, and can still be recovered, as long as you don't overwrite the space that it occupies with another file. (Even then, recovery experts still might be able to retrieve it.)

When you delete a file, you are not really deleting it from your had drive. All the system does if free up the space occupied by that file to make room for other files and until that space is filled with new data, the files you tried to delete are actually still stored on your hard disk and can be recovered.

Typing the wrong command can severely cripple your computer. A wrong switch or wrong option is all it takes. One command that I learned to avoid a long time ago, based on what experienced users told me, is rm -rf /. The rm command is what you use to remove or delete a file or directory.

This package provides a program that can be used to clean out temporary-file directories. It recursively searches the directory, refusing to chdir() across symlinks, and removes files that haven't been accessed in a user-specified amount of time. You can specify a set of files to protect from deletion with a shell pattern.

In our “Advanced Console Tricks” series we have already covered subjects like Getting help and Processes management. Now it’s time to understand how the file permissions work. In this article we’re going to cover topics such as the basics of Linux file access rights, useful commands that allow you to manage file permissions, as well as numerical and special access modes.

Shred utility overwrites a file to hide its contents, and optionally delete it if needed. The idea is pretty simple as it overwrites the specified FILE(s) repeatedly, in order to make it harder for even very expensive hardware probing to recover the data. By default file is overwritten 25 times.

We all know that when you simply delete a file, it’s possible to recover it later. Sometimes this is useful, if you accidentally delete something important; but usually this is a problem, and you really want that file gone forever. This howto will explain how to delete a file in linux securely and permanently, so it can never be recovered.

Deleting a file is a pretty simple task, right? Whether you’re in a GUI or on the command line, it’s really simple to delete a file. Once you’ve deleted it, it’s gone. Except - no it’s not.

The /etc/exports file controls which file systems are exported to remote hosts and specifies options. Blank lines are ignored, comments can be made by starting a line with the hash mark (#), and long lines can be wrapped with a backslash (\).