nwipe

nwipe is a command that will securely erase disks using a variety of recognised methods. It is a fork of the dwipe command used by Darik's Boot and Nuke (dban). nwipe is included with partedmagic if you want a quick and easy bootable CD version. nwipe was created out of a need to run the DBAN dwipe command outside of DBAN, in order to allow its use with any host distribution, thus giving better hardware support.

Compiling & Installing

nwipe requires the following libraries to be installed:

ncurses
pthreads
parted

Debian & Ubuntu prerequisites

If you are compiling nwipe from source, the following libraries will need to be installed first:

sudo apt install \
  build-essential \
  pkg-config \
  automake \
  libncurses5-dev \
  autotools-dev \
  libparted-dev \
  dmidecode

Fedora prerequisites

sudo bash
dnf update
dnf groupinstall "Development Tools"
dnf groupinstall "C Development Tools and Libraries"
yum install ncurses-devel
yum install parted-devel
yum install dmidecode

Note. dmidecode is optional, it provides SMBIOS/DMI host data to stdout or the log file.

Compilation

For a development setup, see the hacking section below.

First create all the autoconf files:

./init.sh

Then compile & install using the following standard commands:

./configure
make
make install

Hacking

If you wish to submit pull requests to this code we would prefer you enable all warnings when compiling. This can be done using the following compile commands:

./configure --prefix=/usr CFLAGS='-O0 -g -Wall -Wextra'
make
make install

The -O0 -g flags disable optimisations. This is required if you're debugging with gdb in an IDE such as Kdevelop. With these optimisations enabled you won't be able to see the values of many variables in nwipe, not to mention the IDE won't step through the code properly.

The -Wall and -Wextra flags enable all compiler warnings. Please submit code with zero warnings.

Once done with your coding then the released/patch/fixed code can be compiled, with all the normal optimisations, using:

./configure --prefix=/usr && make && make install

Bugs

Bugs can be reported on GitHub: https://github.com/martijnvanbrummelen/nwipe

License

GNU General Public License v2.0

louib / nwipe