How would I go about doing this?

[TonyMane()]

I'm at the ending of a little project I'm working on. The tool is deleting itself after it runs, before it deletes I want to damage the file and then have it delete. So I need to make a file shredder. I was reading online about how you can write to it as a text file, but it was not working for me.

[[MPGH]Mayion]

Deleting bytes of the file you mean?

[R3DDOT]

I'm at the ending of a little project I'm working on. The tool is deleting itself after it runs, before it deletes I want to damage the file and then have it delete. So I need to make a file shredder. I was reading online about how you can write to it as a text file, but it was not working for me.

So you're trying to make the program delete itself. But why do you want it to "damage" the file before deleting itself lol?

[TonyMane()]

So you're trying to make the program delete itself. But why do you want it to "damage" the file before deleting itself lol?

Well, I don't want ANYONE to recover it. It's important man, basically all I need before I can call it done..

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Deleting bytes of the file you mean?

Anything that would make it less recoverable.

[[MPGH]Mayion]

Well, I don't want ANYONE to recover it. It's important man, basically all I need before I can call it done..

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Anything that would make it less recoverable.

By deleting or damaging the file's data won't matter if the user recovered the previous version of the executable.
Your best bet would be damaging the file, deleting it and possibility making a registry key to deny the file from opening. (If registryKey "xx" = True : Application.Exit : functionDelete()) something like that.

[TonyMane()]

By deleting or damaging the file's data won't matter if the user recovered the previous version of the executable.
Your best bet would be damaging the file, deleting it and possibility making a registry key to deny the file from opening. (If registryKey "xx" = True : Application.Exit : functionDelete()) something like that.

Okay, and How would I go about damaging the file?

[R3DDOT]

Okay, and How would I go about damaging the file?

I don't think the registry key will do anything.
About "damaging" the file, idk I guess you could delete the PE headers of each module to make reversing harder, but I don't know much about this, maybe @Hitokiri~ could shed some light over this matter.

[Hitokiri~]

I don't think the registry key will do anything.
About "damaging" the file, idk I guess you could delete the PE headers of each module to make reversing harder, but I don't know much about this, maybe @Hitokiri~ could shed some light over this matter.

// "Damaging" a file really won't do anything. What you want to do is prevent recovery tools from retrieving the file after it is permanently deleted.
// Read this: https://lifehacker.com/what-really-ha...our-1659889380

// So essentially what you want to do AFTER you delete your file is to fill all these gaps where your file USED to reside on your HDD/SSD.
// To do that, just do a large amount of write operations. ( File Shredders work the same way )

// Using: https://msdn.microsof*****m/en-us/lib...(v=vs.85).aspx ( CreateFile )
// https://msdn.microsof*****m/en-us/lib...(v=vs.85).aspx ( WriteFile )
// https://msdn.microsof*****m/en-us/lib...(v=vs.85).aspx ( CloseHandle )

// Some pseudocode:
for( var i = 0; i < maxNumFilesToCreate; i++ )
   var sz = GetRandomFileSizeMB( 30 ); // 30 MB max per file
   var path =

GetRandomFilePath();
   var file = CreateFile( path );
   WriteFile( file, RandomBuffer( sz ) );
   CloseHandle( file );
   // Delete the file after.
   DeleteFile( path );
endfor

More advanced implementations would actually read the file journel and overwrite the sectors on the disk directly. This method merely attempts to "guess" that it's overwriting a file segment. Doing it enough times will make the file unrecoverable but file-journal reading is far more accurate.