Utilities such as PGP and the GNU Privacy Guard provide strong encryption, but encryption is useless if the original plaintext can be recovered. When using PGP and GPG, temporary files that are disk-backed should be stored on an encrypted file system. That way, the plaintext never hits the platters. Wipe is designed for situations where an encrypted file system isn't practical. 1 . at least one of Peter Guttman's patterns is correct for the device you're wiping 2 .
Some programs are vulnerable to symlink races.
To avoid this problem with wipe, only wipe files in directories that are not writable by untrusted users. The Mersenne Twister PRNG is used for speed. Major rewrite with lots of new features. Many command line options have changed. Fixed up block device code, and some other minor fixes.