Hi, I'm using shred-4.5.7 to clean disk partitions. Often a partition has an odd number of 512-byte blocks; Linux fdisk indicates such partitions with a '+'. Shred, when used on such a partition, gives three error messages:
attempt to access beyond end of device 03:06: rw=0, want=4200968, (=0x401a08), limit=4200966 attempt to access beyond end of device 03:06: rw=0, want=4200968, (=0x401a08), limit=4200966 /usr/bin/shred: /dev/hda6: error writing at offset 4301787136: Input/output error attempt to access beyond end of device 03:06: rw=0, want=4200968, (=0x401a08), limit=4200966 /usr/bin/shred: /dev/hda6: error writing at offset 4301787137: Input/output error and stops after the first pass. I had left the machine unattended, hoping for all 25 passes to complete. The -x option does not help. (Therefore probably the 2003-03-08 modification to shred.c wouldn't have helped either in this case.) The only option that helps is to use the --size option with a value of the limit mentioned above (4200966), minus 2, times 1024. Unfortunately this is a bit complicated, because I don't know where the "minus 2" comes from, and also because I need 'bc' to compute this, but it is on the root partition that I just erased through pass 1/25... OK, the offset from the first error message does it as well... Suggestion: Could shred, when encountering this error on a block device file, print the error message but nevertheless continue with the remaining passes? That would be more useful than the current behaviour. Bruno _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
