Ubuntu Unleashed

Adding wipe to your Nautilus context menu is useful in making it so that you can securely delete any number of files and/or folders at one time simply by selecting them, right clicking, and clicking wipe. Before you can add wipe to the context menu you must have nautilus-actions and wipe installed. To install them on a Debian based system, at the terminal, simply type:

sudo apt-get install wipe
sudo apt-get install nautilus-actions

When you install nautilus-actions a GUI based tool will be installed to allow you configure context menu additions. Access it by, at the terminal, typing:
nautilus-actions-config

Adding the wipe command to the context menu is now very straight forward. The following instructions were written for nautilus-actions 1.4.1:

1. Click the +Add button.
2. For the label enter: Wipe.
3. For the tooltip enter: Use the wipe utility to securely delete the file(s)/folder(s).
4. For the path enter: wipe
5. For the parameters enter: -rf %M
6. Go to the Conditions tab and select the radio button labeled "Both" for when the command should appear and check "Appears if select has multiple files or folders"
7. I left everything else at their defaults. If you don't want to do any further customization just hit OK and close the configuration tool.

8. You can select an icon, I prefer the gtk-dialog-warning icon.
The parameters to wipe, -rf %M, causes files and folders to be deleted without prompting. Due to the -r command, if there are files or subfolders in a selected folder they will also be wiped. If you would like for files to be wiped even when write permission is not set change the parameters to: -rcf %M.

The final step is to reset nautilus. At the terminal type:

nautilus -q
nautilus

You will now have a command for wipe in your Nautilus context menu that allows you to securely delete any number of files and/or folders in two clicks.