the full context of the quote provoking Linus's rant is extremely relevant here: The current counting that we do gives the wrong numbers, in the edge cases

the full context of the quote provoking Linus's rant is extremely relevant here: The current counting that we do gives the wrong numbers, in the edge cases. To my knowledge a deleted sysfs directory has never returned nlink == 0. Keeping compatibility is easy enough that it looks like it is worth doing, but maintaining 30+ years of backwards compatibility is what nlink >1 in unix filesystem directories is. I don't see any practical sense in keeping . and .. directories on disk or upping the unix nlink directory count because of them. To me it looks like just one of those things you do. Like hash directory entries so you can have a big directory and still be able to have a 32bit offset you can pass to lseek that is stable across renames and deletes. to use PG's terms, Linus is arguing against this at DH0 or maybe DH1 here[1]. Maybe the above argument sucks, but Linus didn't refute it at all. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html