> Is there a way to delete a directory instantly and completely without
> first deleting all its subdirectories and files recursively?
The hierarchical structure that you see is not "real" -- directories are not
physical containers for the files that they appear to contain. The directory
hierarchy is a carefully maintained fiction.
Irrelevant aside:
The original Mac file system took this a step further -- it made the
directory structure
totally a visual fiction -- all of the files were at the root of the (3.5")
floppy)
disk, and only _seemed_ to be arranged in folders. Thankfully this was
supplanted by HFS.
It is better to think of directories/folders as a special kind of file that
contains an index to a set of files that it is going to _pretend_ to contain.
Conceptually, this works much like classical Cocoa memory management. Each
(directory/object) "owns" a set of (files/objects) by reference ("retains" the
(file/object)).
When you delete a file from a directory, it is "released". If no other
directory has an ownership claim on that file, it is "dealloc'ed".
Your (folder/object) doesn't contain the objects that it "owns". It doesn't
really even "own" them -- it just has a "ownership claim" on them.
From Wikipedia's article about Hard Links:
> "a hard link is a directory entry that associates a name with a file on a
> file system. A directory is itself a special kind of file that contains a
> list of such entries."
Note that due to the use of hard links it is possible to have a single physical
file that can appear in multiple directories. Each one of those directories
owns a reference to the "real" file. Each reference is as "real" as any other.
All references have to be "unlinked" for the file to be marked as deleted.
The "file" can even have different "names" in the different directories!
Hard links are the chain saw of filesystem features -- powerful, but
potentially quite dangerous. Note that the OSX GUI provides no means of
producing hard links, or even symlinks.
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