From: Lionel Bouton Date: 2007-06-26T07:47:21+09:00 Subject: Re: Clearing the RAM Ari Brown wrote: > Hey, > I was wondering, is there a way to clear the RAM Ruby uses in some > code? For instance, if I read in an entire file into the memory, can I > clear the RAM that was used? I guess that would probably be quite difficult because the language doesn't guarantee anything regarding where the memory is allocated, when it is freed, overwritten or reallocated. You may want to implement this in something closer to the metal like C where you get this kind of control. If you really must use Ruby I suppose that if you pay attention to the objects you use to store the data from the file and find out how they use memory (by looking at the actual Ruby C source code mainly) then you could probably read the file, track all objects passed information you want to protect and define methods that you know (from actual C source reading) will overwrite any important information left around. You'll have to make sure your code runs on the exact smae version of the interpreter and libs you used when examining the sources. Messy... A simpler way (but maybe not workable for you) would be to fork to handle the file processing and run the whole code on an OS which scrambles memory of terminated processes (I'm not sure, but hardened versions of Linux might very well implement this). Lionel.