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From: ron@topaz.rutgers.edu.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Bug in Ultrix2.0?
Message-ID: <16731@topaz.rutgers.edu>
Date: Sun, 29-Nov-87 10:41:01 EST
Article-I.D.: topaz.16731
Posted: Sun Nov 29 10:41:01 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 1-Dec-87 06:49:31 EST
References: <10570@brl-adm.ARPA>
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.
Lines: 10

The whole purpose of "unlink" as opposed to "rm" is to get around all
these nice consistency checks like "file is a directory" that rm does
for you.  Linking and unlinking directories makes a mess of your file
system topology, and hence it is reserved for the superuser.  Rmdir
verifies that the directory is empty before removing it, and it also
removes the links for . and .. (well at least ..) before blowing things
away.  Unlinking a directory causes small parts of your filesystem
(still allocated) to drift away so that no one can access them.

-Ron