wipe command not found

Introduction

When you run more command in linux terminal / console, you get the following error message

wipe: command not found

or when using sudo you get the following error message

sudo: wipe: command not found

Solutions to wipe: command not found

How To Fix wipe: command not found in Ubuntu / Debian / Kali Linux / Raspbian

In Ubuntu wipe is provided by wipe package.

wipe is:

Recovery of supposedly erased data from magnetic media is easier than what many people would like to believe. A technique called Magnetic Force Microscopy (MFM) allows any moderately funded opponent to recover the last two or three layers of data written to disk. Wipe repeatedly writes special patterns to the files to be destroyed, using the fsync() call and/or the O_SYNC bit to force disk access.

Wipe can permanently delete data in hard disks and flash drives (caution! several writes can damage solid medias).

This program is useful in anti-forensics and security activities.

To fix this problem, we can install more using the command below.

sudo apt-get -y install wipe

This command might take some time to finish depending on your machine internet connection.

You can also use apt command to install wipe.

sudo apt -y install wipe

Or if you have aptitude installed you can use the following command.

sudo aptitude install wipe

Summary

In this tutorial we learn how to fix wipe command not found error in Ubuntu / Debian / Kali Linux or Raspbian distribution.