Sterilizing free space

[Sy Ali]

I can nicely sterilize a complete drive with shred -n 2 -z -v
/dev/<device> however I don't know how to do a partition or just the
slack space on a drive.

This bails out with a complaint about running out of disk space,
before completing its first pass:
shred -n 2 -z -v /dev/<partition>

The only solutions I've come across deal with an entire drive:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/<device>
http://dban.sourceforge.net/


Ideas?
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