Brain fart: no format option on a pen drive pop-up menu?

[Alan Cox]

> Nobody talked about secure-erasing files to prevent recovery by
> forensic means or undelete ("unformat") utilities, that issue was
> introduced into the discussion by nitpickers on this thread, who
> started arguments about what low-lever formating is, or what the
> format word should mean.

Well actually the nit picking is very very important here.

It's because 'writing all the sectors with zero' doesn't blank the media
that you don't want to pick a name that implies anything like that such
as 'erase', but want to use a term like 'format' which in the generic
sense does would avoid such confusion.

You could put secure erase on the menu too but its probably an obscure
option and best kept separate I would have thought.

So I don't actually think there is a problem.

Alan