Bug#544774: I love the wipe man page, but there is one thing that is not clear

[Micah Anderson]

Package: wipe
Version: 0.21-9
Severity: minor

I could not find out from the man page how many passes wipe
takes. When using quick mode, it specifies that the default passes is
4, and you can override that, but only for quick mode. For normal
mode, there is no indication of how many passes, or if it just
continues indefinately.

Using the source we find it does MAX_PASSES, which is 35:

#define MAX_PASSES (sizeof(passinfo)/(sizeof(*passinfo)))

So although I appreciate the differentiation between 'normal' and
'quick' mode, it would be nice if it were spelled out more clearly
that the 'normal' mode takes that many passes, especially since quick
mode is spelled out.

Thanks!
micah


-- System Information:
Debian Release: squeeze/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'stable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.26-2-vserver-686 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages wipe depends on:
ii  libc6                         2.9-25     GNU C Library: Shared libraries

wipe recommends no packages.

wipe suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information