How to Create Drop-to-Erase Desktop Shortcut for SDelete

Everyone knows about the powerful file shredder called SDelete which can be used from a command line interface to shred one or more files. Before shredding the files, it renames them so that the file table doesn’t contain the original names for the deleted files. The shredding can be done in one or more passes.

Using a command line tool like SDelete for shredding files is great for one or two files, but when you have to delete dozens of files it becomes a tad difficult. This is specially true for the situations when we have hundreds of files in a folder and we want to erase only a select few.

For these situations, a drop-to-erase shortcut works the best. We can create a small batch script that can take all the dropped files and send them to the SDelete for shredding. This way we do not have to give any commands and we can still use SDelete for shredding of one or more files instantly.

Here is how we can create this Drop-to-Erase desktop shortcut for SDelete:

  1. First of all download SDelete from https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/sdelete and extract sdelete.exe from the downloaded ZIP archive into C:\Windows\System32.
  2. Create a new file in Windows Notepad and copy-paste the following inside it: 
    @ECHO OFF
REM BATCH SCRIPT BY TRISHTECH.COM
REM BEFORE USE, PLACE SDELETE.EXE IN C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32
sdelete  %* -p 1

    SDelete Drop-to-Erase Shortcut

  3. Save the file as SDEL.BAT. This is your drop-to-erase shortcut.
  4. Now you can try dropping some files that you want to shred on SDEL.BAT, it will send them to SDelete for shredding. You will see a small command prompt window open where the progress will be displayed.SDelete Drop-to-Erase Shortcut

If you want to use sdelete64.exe, then you can use that too but change the its name to sdelete.exe and then follow the same steps. Alternatively, you can copy sdelete64.exe to the System32 folder and then make the relevant changes in the batch script.

You can change the batch script to make it shred the files many times by changing the -p parameter value. For example, if you want to shred a file 3 times, then change it to -p 3 and so on. Usually 1 time is enough but you can increase the number of overwrite passes.

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