Todd Gruhns Acct wrote:

> In a book i have been reading, they mention wiping your disk partitions
> using the line :
> 
> dd bs=1000k </dev/zero >/dev/sdXa 
> 
> Where X is the drive number. NORTON utilities, when wiping has options such as
> secure wipe, and govt wipe, and military wipe. Norton wipes by writing a string of
> 0, then a string of 1, then a string of 0, repeating the process different
> numbers of times for different levels of security.
> 
> OK, so why have we NOT GOT a /dev/one so we can do the same thing?

A device doesn't have to be your only source of ones.  Something like
this may work (but sure is damn ugly, and probably not very fast):

yes `awk 'BEGIN { printf "\xff" }' < /dev/null` | tr -d '\n' | dd bs=1000k of=/dev/sdXa

I'm sure someone else can come up with something better using standard
utilities.

Simon.
--
Simon Burge                            <simonb@wasabisystems.com>
NetBSD CDs, Support and Service:    http://www.wasabisystems.com/