srm, sfill and stuff like that

[goldstar1]

So I'm trying everything in Linux and I have some questions about sfill. It is part of the srm tool kit.

sfill rewrites all the areas that are not being used on a hard drive and places zeros in those areas so that whatever was previously written in that area could not be accessed by anything ....So I tried it ...The next day the program was still running

I looked for documentation and all I could find was 1.) it doesn't have any bugs and never did 2.) instructions on how to get it started 3.) lastly...what it does.

but what is it doing for stupid people like myself...

1.) Is it supposed to be running for 24 or so hours? I have about 143gig of free space.
2.) Will it stop by itself after all the free space is cleared?
3.) I thought you couldn't clean a journalized ext4 file system, but we have 'srm' and 'wipe' and even Husse himself shows how to install 'wipe' on our Nautilus file manager.
4.) I'm confused...

[lagagnon]

Yup, wipe and fill programs can take many many hours to wipe and/or fill large drives. It won't just look at the 143G, it will probably have to check your entire partition. And if it does it bit by bit rather than in large blocks (which I suspect is its default) then yes, it might even take days!

[goldstar1]

Thank You for your response...