From: Dave Horsfall
it actually *unlinked* directories
Maybe the application was written by a LISP programmer? :-)
(Not really, of course; it was probably just someone who didn't know much
about Unix. They had a list of system calls, and 'unlink' probably said '
only
works on directories when the caller is root', so...)
Speaking of LISP and GC, it's impressive how GC is not really a big issue any
more. At one point people were even building special CPUs that had hardware
support for GC; now it seems to be a 'solved problem' on ordinary CPUs.
Noel