Delete On Click is a very straightforward security software program for the Windows operating system. It adds a Delete On Click entry to the Windows Explorer context menu that can be used to delete files securely on the operating system.

The security software will delete the file completely so that no traces of it are found on the hard drive where it was stored. The method that is used to delete the files securely is unfortunately not revealed by the developers of the security software. Tests with file recovery tools did not display the deleted tests files when deleted with the Delete On click program.

Delete On Click is a free download that is available on the developer’s website.

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Such is the case with removing files. There are two fundamental ways to remove a file:

With the help of a GUI such as Thunar, Dolphin, or Nautilus

With the help of a command such as rm or shred.

In this article we will primarily examine the latter and touch on the former.

The former – GUI

As you would expect, in all three of the graphical file managers you can easily remove a file simply by right clicking the file and selecting Delete. There are, however, some subtle differences. You will notice, in both Dolphin and Nautilus you can choose between Deleting a file and moving a file to the Trash. This behavior mimics that of Windows Explorer. Once you move a file to the Trash it will remain there until you empty your trash. Should you select to actually Delete the file, however, that file is deleted right away.

This behavior is not available in Thunar. With Thunar you can keep it or delete it.

rm that file

The basic remove command is rm. It is used like this:

rm OPTIONS

Believe it or not there are options to go along with the rm command. There are two options that are used most often:

f – This option will force the delete. In other words you will not have to answer “y” to every file you want to delete. This is very handy when you are deleted a directory.

r – This option will recursively delete all files within a directory as well as the directory itself.

As you can surmise, the r and f options are most often used together. So to delete the ~/TEST directory and all of its files you would issue the command:

rm -rf ~/TEST

If you only wanted to delete the file test.txt within the ~/TEST directory you would issue the command:

rm ~/TEST/test.txt

What if you wanted to delete all jpg files within the ~/TEST directory? Simple:

rm -f ~/TEST/*.jpg

The * character is a wild card which means, in this case, anything that ends with .jpg. Notice the “.”. If you leave that out you can delete any file ending in jpg – not just any file with the extension .jpg.

shredd’ing a file

The shred command is a whole different beast. Shred is for the paranoid. Shred completely obliviates a file by overwriting its contents. Instead of deleting a file shred will simply overwrite a file and the end results will be an unreadable binary file that can then be safely removed.

And no matter how paranoid you are, shred will help you out. You can declare how many overwrite iterations shred will perform. You can even add a final overwrite of nothing but zeros to hide the fact that you ever shredded a file. And finally, you can also add a switch to inform shred to automatically remove the file after the iterations.

Shred is used like so:

shred OPTIONS filename

The most popular options are:

v – Show progress.

z – Add final overwrite of zeros.

u – Remove file after iterations

n – Overwrites n times

So to shred a file by iterating 10 times, followed by a final iteration of zeros, and then deleting the file upon completion you would issue the command:

shred -v -n 10 -z  FILENAME -u

Where FILENAME is the actual file name.

After that command your removed file has vanished into thin air.

Final thoughts

Many different routes to the same destination. Of this, Linux is the master. In the case of removing files, you can send it to the trash for possible later easy retrieval, remove it with the possibility of a much more difficult retrieval, or shred it with no hopes of retrieval. Your call.

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Auto Delete (via Shell City) by Dario Volaric is a similar tool for Windows. The main difference is that it will run at system startup or when the user executes it manually. Another difference is that it will only delete files in the directory if they are older than the age specified by the user. The time frame ranges from 1 day to 1 year.

The user can include subfolders automatically, select if the files should be moved into the recycle or if a status window should be shown during the deletion.

The software program will automatically close after the job has ended. The main limitation of it is that it can only process one target folder. It is also unlikely that the software developer will update the program anytime soon because the last update dates back to 2005.

Do you know of a similar application that can delete files if they are older than x? Let us know in the comments.

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