Except that shred is not guaranteed to work on many (most?) modern filesystems. From `man shred`:
CAUTION: Note that shred relies on a very important assumption: that
the file system overwrites data in place. This is the traditional way
to do things, but many modern file system designs do not satisfy this
assumption. The following are examples of file systems on which shred
is not effective, or is not guaranteed to be effective in all file sys‐
tem modes:
* log-structured or journaled file systems, such as those supplied with
AIX and Solaris (and JFS, ReiserFS, XFS, Ext3, etc.)
* file systems that write redundant data and carry on even if some
writes fail, such as RAID-based file systems
* file systems that make snapshots, such as Network Appliance's NFS
server
* file systems that cache in temporary locations, such as NFS version 3
clients
It works fine on default EXT3. The only thing journaled is meta-data. You snipped that part out. More from man shred
In the case of ext3 file systems, the above disclaimer applies (and shred is thus of limited effectiveness) only in data=journal mode, which journals file data in
addition to just metadata.
In both the data=ordered (default) and data=writeback modes, shred works as usual.
