Re: unlink() and directories.

[Thomas Bushnell, BSG]

nisse@lysator.liu.se (Niels Möller) writes:

> tb@becket.net (Thomas Bushnell, BSG) writes:
> 
> > "Alfred M. Szmidt" <ams@kemisten.nu> writes:
> > 
> > > Is it intentional that unlink() on GNU/Hurd does not handle
> > > directories?
> > 
> > Yes.
> 
> How will this work for nodes that are both directories and files?

It's up to the filesystem to decide.  The basic principle is that
"unlink" shouldn't kill off arbitrarily large chunks of file storage. 

Regardless, if "unlink" *does* succeed for such nodes, it has to
actually do a complete deletion, and not just remove one filesystem
link pointer, the way old-style Unix did back in the day.  (To delete
a directory, back in the day, there was no rmdir call; you used a
setuid root program to unlink the *three* relevant links.)