A safe text editor // why??

Heinz Diehl htd at fritha.org
Tue Sep 11 16:57:12 CEST 2012


On 11.09.2012, Peter Lebbing wrote: 

> The only sure-fire remedy against a
> temp file that got deleted is a full wipe of the partition the file was on, as
> far as I know.

You can mount /tmp and the various other tmpfiles to memory. That's
what I do (not for security reasons, but to have the tmp stuff deleted
on reboot).

> I have done this one time or another. I knew I wanted to edit some document
> which would or might end up on my hard disk, but I absolutely wanted it kept
> "safe". So I made a full image of the hard disk (every single byte of the hard
> disk), edited the file, then restored the full image, every single byte of it.

If this makes sense for you, you could easily edit your file, save it
somewhere where it is secured, delete it on the harddisk and fill the
unused space with random noise via dd or similar. It's a lot of work,
but by far easier than what you did.

Why don't you just boot from USB-stick or DVD, edit your file, save it
away and reboot?




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