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by dTal 3680 days ago
And yet it doesn't "work":

  dtal@reepicheep:~$ cat /dev/urandom | shred -
  shred: -: invalid file type
1 comments

Your command points stdin to the output of some random command. Even if you actually redirected stdout (pipe to cat, not from), it still wouldn't work, because cat's stdin isn't a file.

You need to point stdout to an actual file, like this:

    shred > /my/secret/file.txt
Why would you do this? At the end of a long batch of commands that all write to some temporary file opened on stdout. Not uncommon in shell-land.