On Tue, 04 May 2010 23:02:29 +1000, Charles wrote: > I am by no means an expert in this area, but what I think happens (and I > may well be wrong) is that the directory is deleted on the file system. > The link from the parent is removed, and the parent's link count is > decremented, as you observed, but the directory itself is still intact > with it's original contents, including the "." and ".." names and > associated inode numbers. Unix does not normally zero out files on > deletion - the file's blocks usually retain their contents, and I would > not expect directories to be a special case.
You are correct. System calls don't "delete" inodes (files, directories, etc), they "unlink" them. Deletion occurs when the inode's link count reaches zero and no process holds a reference to the inode (a reference could be a descriptor, or the process' cwd, chroot directory, or an mmap()d file, etc). IOW, reference-counted garbage collection. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
