In FreeBSD, you can use the shred command to permanently delete or remove files. The shred command overwrites the data in a file multiple times, making it difficult or impossible to recover the original data.
To use shred to delete a file, you can run the following command:
shred -uv /path/to/file
The -u option tells shred to remove the file after it has been overwritten, and the -v option enables verbose output so you can see what shred is doing.
By default, shred will overwrite the file 25 times. You can specify a different number of overwrites using the -n option. For example, to overwrite the file 50 times, you can run:
shred -n 50 -uv /path/to/file
Note that using shred to delete a file can be a slow process, especially if you are overwriting the file many times. Also, keep in mind that once a file has been deleted using shred, it cannot be recovered.
To use shred to delete a directory and all of its contents, you can use the following command:
shred -uv -r /path/to/directory
The -r option tells shred to operate recursively, so it will delete all files and subdirectories in the specified directory.