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

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Sun, Aug 28, 2011 at 15:37:23 -0500,
  Aaron Konstam <akonstam at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> 
> Remove and erase are synonyms. The people who argue that format does not
> erase the files would have to argue that rm does not remove files.

It doesn't really remove them, it unlinks them. (At least on ext file
systems.) When the last reference to a file is removed, then the file
gets is deleted. (Its space is made available for reuse.)

You can actually still get copy of a file which has had all of its normal
links removed, if a program has it open. /proc has a link to all open file
descriptors for each process and you can use that to make a copy. (But
not to relink.)