How to securely wipe and erase a disk in Linux

shred overwrites a target by generating random sequences of 0 and 1.

This command will follow 5 passes in the background

shred -fz -n 5 --random-source=/dev/urandom /dev/sda &

This will take a long, long time. However, I read that one pass is sufficient (Wright, Kleiman, & Sundhar, 2008), so maybe don’t do multiple passes after all.

• https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Securely_wipe_disk (I swear I don’t run Arch, by the way 🥲.)
• Overwriting Hard Drive Data: The Great Wiping Controversy (Wright, Kleiman, & Sundhar, 2008)