The next option to erase drive, which is available on both Linux and Mac, though not always installed by default on Linux, is shred. Additionally, you can use a disk as the input file and point to a filename that doesn’t exist to create an image of your disk.Īlso Read: The Ultimate A To Z List of Linux Commands Erasing disk in Linux and Mac using shred cat /dev/urandom > /dev/sdaĪlternatively, you can use dcfldd, which supports all that dd does and much more, including (most importantly?) displaying the amount of data copied.īONUS TIP: Apart from using dd to erase disk in Linux and Mac, you can use it to write an ISO to a drive by specifying the ISO as the input file to create a bootable USB disk with ease. You could even accomplish this with cat as well. dd will stop when it encounters the end of the file, the end of the file being the end of the disk. We’ve omitted the bs and count options because when writing through a whole disk, they are unnecessary. for i in $( seq 0 2 ) do dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda done A for loop is handy for this drive wiping process, else you would need to intervene manually and repeat it as necessary, hardly efficient.

Alright, what if you want to securely erase an entire drive? Well, you can still do that with dd, all you need to do is change your input from /dev/zero to /dev/random or /dev/urandom and then run it through however many passes you believe is sufficiently secure.

Linux wipe disk