Steve Bellovin on Nostr: npub1h8k94…qerlv I strongly suspect that it’s historical. In particular: if ...

npub1h8k94vzcctr4x2rhzawkckryezu7kvpeg7de6y06lkhg2z5pfymskqerlv (npub1h8k…erlv) I strongly suspect that it’s historical. In particular: if rmdir(2) dates to 4.2bsd, how did one remove directories before that. The answer can be found by looking at the source to, e.g., v7 rmdir at https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/cmd/rmdir.c — it simply unlinked the directory. Only root could do that (and yes, rmdir(1) was setuid (and I think insecure against race conditions), but without good locking (and Unix didn't have good locking then) you could end up with a tree mess if non-empty.