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Would you explain how to erase data from device connected through USB in terminal

Victor Muthomi
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2 Answers2

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Ubuntu / Linux doesn't make a difference between a built-in drive or an external drive, e.g. a USB pen drive.

Open a terminal, navigate to the drive (usually mounted under /media/your_user_name and use either the rm command to delete single files or rm -r directory_name to delete a directory recursively. Or use one of the mkfs commands (e.g. mkfs.fat) for formatting the drive. Remember that for the latter the stick has to be not mounted.

noisefloor
  • 1,769
0

There are (at least) two (2) commonly-used utilities for erasing data from a drive:

  1. dd
  2. shred

In the examples below, the partition to be wiped is called sdX1, where X is typically a, b, c, ... etc. You can learn this partition name from running the command lsblk --fs when the USB device to be erased is "plugged in" to your system.

1. Using dd (ref man dd):

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX1 bs=1M
  • The "input file" (if) is /dev/zero - a linux pseudo-device of null bytes
  • The "output file" (of) is the partition on your drive you wish to erase; i.e. /dev/sdX1
  • The "block size" (bs) is the size of blocks to be written (larger block sizes usually translate to quicker results).

2. Using shred (ref man shred):

sudo shred /dev/sdX1
  • /dev/sdX1 : the "file" to be shredded
Seamus
  • 698