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At some point hitherto, Jerry Feldman hath spake thusly:
> think the the directory itself somehow became corrupted.  I can
> write a program that uses stat that can call unlink(2). What I need
> to do is a force delete of the directory itself without trying to
> delete the contents.

Hrmmm...  I seem to recall reading somewhere that this can't be done
on Linux.  I believe some (mostly older) Unix variants allowed this,
but the Linux FS developers felt that allowing this sort of thing was
a Bad Thing(tm) hence it's only possible at the kernel level.

The reasoning, IIRC, is that allowing (root only) users to do this is
too prone to FS corruption.

I'm not positive that all this is true; OTOH the rmdir syscall does
not allow the deletion of directories that aren't empty, and does not
provide a way to force the issue.  I'm not aware of any other means of
removing a directory on Linux.  IIRC, some variants allowed unlink()
to remove directories; Linux's unlink() does not (it returns EPERM in
such a case).  I think what you want is impossible.

- -- 
Derek Martin               ddm@pizzashack.org    
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