0vershred

The 0vershred command is used to securely delete files by overwriting their contents multiple times, making it difficult for even advanced recovery tools to retrieve the original data. This command is particularly useful for erasing sensitive information. (copied from the shred man page, all credits to this information belong to shred).

0vershred is faster than shred when shredding big testing files:

truncate -s 1G test.bin
time shred --iterations=2 test.bin
######
real 1m53.908s
user 0m0.986s
sys 0m15.761s

truncate -s 1G test2.bin
time 0vershred -i 2 test2.bin
#####
real 0m03.371s
user 0m0.437s
sys 0m12.761s

-i NUM of iterations to perform, by default they are 1.

-r NUM of iterations to perfrom to rename the provided filename. Useful not only to shred file, but to obfuscate it's name to make it harder to be found by searching thru the data recovery programs by it's original name, as there won't be any match for the particular deleted file.

If on Linux/*BSD/Mac compile with:

make -j8 # 8 cores/threads to use in parallel compile
sudo/doas make install

# to uninstall it
sudo/doas make uninstall

Tested with Visual Studio Code Editor, but you need to install MingW, once downloaded extract it to C:\MingW, then re-open Visual Studio Code Editor, you might want to install C\C++ extensions if you plan to write C\C++ code with the editor. If you plan to contribute to this project go to File->Preferences->Settings and type to search for cppStandard and set it to c17 to both C++ and C.

I use One Monokai theme for the VScode Editor

In Visual Studio Code Editor, go to Terminal->Configure Tasks...->Create tasks.json from template and copy and paste this into it:

{
  "version": "2.0.0",
  "tasks": [
    {
        "type": "cppbuild",
        "label": "C/C++",
        "command": "C:\\MingW\\bin\\g++.exe",
        "args": [
            "-fdiagnostics-color=always",
            "-std=c++20",
            "-ggdb",
            "-lpthread",
            "-Wall",
            "-Wextra",
            "-O2",
            "-pipe",
            "-pedantic",
            "-Wundef",
            "-Wshadow",
            "-W",
            "-Wwrite-strings",
            "-Wcast-align",
            "-Wstrict-overflow=5",
            "-Wconversion",
            "-Wpointer-arith",
            "-Wformat=2",
            "-Wsign-compare",
            "-Wendif-labels",
            "-Wredundant-decls",
            "-Winit-self",
            "${file}",
            "-o",
            "${fileDirname}/${fileBasenameNoExtension}"
        ],
        "options": {
            "cwd": "C:\\MingW\\bin"
        },
        "problemMatcher": [
            "$gcc"
        ],
        "group": {
            "kind": "build",
            "isDefault": true
        },
        "detail": "compiler: C:\\MingW\\bin\\g++.exe"
    }
]
}

To overwrite some files with the 0vershred.bat script, copy the name of the destination folder or once the script is started you can provide the desired folder, but you will have to use Double Quotes if the folder has spaces in it's name, after that right click it in the opened CMD window and press enter.

Optioanlly if you want to play around with the code from VSCode's console -- wait until it compiles, after that press CTRL + SHIFT + ` and paste this cp -r C:\Users\YOUR_USERNAME_GOES_HERE\Desktop\main.exe C:\MingW\bin;cd C:\MingW\bin;.\main.exe C:\