searching for and securely deleting files

[joec3]

what program do i use to search for files and is there a program to securely delete files (ie overwrite several times)

[mali2297]

what program do i use to search for files and is there a program to securely delete files (ie overwrite several times)

If you're comfortable with command line tools, then you can use locate or find for searching.

locate is simple and fast, just type


locate filename

However, it uses a database which might need to be updated at times (it should do so automatically but I don't know how often). To update the database, type


sudo updatedb


find is more advanced. There is a tutorial here:
http://content.hccfl.edu/pollock/Unix/FindCmd.htm

If you want a GUI tool, then check out catfish (http://software.twotoasts.de/index.php?/pages/catfish_summary.html) (available in the repos).

As far as I know, there is no completely secure way to delete files in the ext3 file system. shred is an old unix tool which worked for ext2 and might still be somewhat useful. To overwrite and delete, type


shred -u filename