Secure delete with rm on OS X

There is no guarantee this goes on the same sectors on the disk. I think that would only be guaranteed by a "secure delete call" to the drive's firmware.<p>The only way I know to securely erase the empty space on the drive is a call like "cat /dev/urandom &#62; file; rm file". This will error once the drive is full, then be deleted.

Know what's easier?<p>Right click the trash bin, and hold Command. You'll see "Secure Empty Trash". You can also do the rm -P <i>from</i> the trash bin, which I wish they allowed you to do under normal circumstances. (dterm makes this easy.)

This isn't an OS X specific feature, it's a feature from the FreeBSD userland that Apple borrowed into OS X.

Secure delete is not reliable with modern filesystems. Just use full-disk encryption -- it's free.

Or use srm.