rm -rf : What does it really do

[James McDonald]

Joel Hammer wrote:

>Just an idle thought while waiting for rm -rf* to remove a 40 gig directory. 
>
>This is taking quite a while. Does  rm just unlink files, leaving the
>data recoverable, or does it make the date unrecoverable?
>
>Thanks,
>  
>
With 40 gig of data and possibly 100's of thousands of files you would 
expect it to take along while to update the pointers to the files and 
mark that disk space as available again and if the data isn't contiguous 
it would take longer as it had to skip back and forth to reallocate the 
disk space.

My understanding of disks is windows based so I'm not much help but 
removing files by unlinking the reference to them in the filesystem is 
standard. I thought only wipe utilities did the 0's and 1's thing.

Of course I'm interested to know the correct answer aswell. So if there 
are any file system gurus....

James