Quoting John N. Alegre
On my old Red Hat systems I used to use PGP to securely delete and wipe files. What I mean is delete the file so it can not be recovered even from the bits because the bits are scrambled on the delete.
The commands where something like
pgp -w file
gpg does not have a wipe command. For single files, e.g. a list of usernames and password on Web sites, I find using vim with the command below in ~/.vimrc works. I keep the file always encrypted on disk and use vim to view or edit it. For bulk erasing, use the wipe command. Note: I don't understand vim config files, so you are on your own for support. HTH, Jeffrey augroup encrypted au! " First make sure nothing is written to ~/.viminfo while editing " an encrypted file. autocmd BufNewFile,BufReadPre,FileReadPre *.gpg,*.asc set viminfo= " We don't want a swap file, as it writes unencrypted data to disk. autocmd BufNewFile,BufReadPre,FileReadPre *.gpg,*.asc set noswapfile " Switch to binary mode to read the encrypted file. autocmd BufReadPre,FileReadPre *.gpg set bin autocmd BufReadPre,FileReadPre *.gpg,*.asc let ch_save = &ch|set ch=2 autocmd BufReadPost,FileReadPost *.gpg,*.asc \ '[,']!sh -c 'gpg --decrypt 2> /dev/null' " Switch to normal mode for editing autocmd BufReadPost,FileReadPost *.gpg set nobin autocmd BufReadPost,FileReadPost *.gpg,*.asc let &ch = ch_save|unlet ch_save autocmd BufReadPost,FileReadPost *.gpg,*.asc \ execute ":doautocmd BufReadPost " . expand("%:r") " Convert all text to encrypted text before writing autocmd BufWritePre,FileWritePre *.gpg \ '[,']!sh -c 'gpg --default-recipient-self -e 2>/dev/null' autocmd BufWritePre,FileWritePre *.gpg set bin autocmd BufWritePre,FileWritePre *.asc \ '[,']!sh -c 'gpg --default-recipient-self -e -a 2>/dev/null' " Undo the encryption so we are back in the normal text, directly " after the file has been written. autocmd BufWritePost,FileWritePost *.gpg,*.asc u autocmd BufWritePost,FileWritePost *.gpg set nobin augroup END