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Ok, I just got quite the scare... I have a folder with some important files. Using the Terminal I had created hard-links to those files in a different folder. Something like this:

mkdir test
ln important-files/* test/

All well and good. I had a Finder window open in the important-files folder, and in the Terminal I then decided to delete my test folder with the hard-links:

rm -rf test/

Now comes the scary part... in the important-files Finder window , the files started to disappear!

Turns out it was just Mac OS X being "funny" like it often is. The files were still there if I did an ls important-files/. But the only way to get them back in the Finder was to do a killall Finder.

What in the world is going on here? Why is it doing this?

Update: Is this a bug in Mac OS X 10.4 or something? I seem to get less scary behavior on an iMac with 10.5 here...

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The OS X filesystem event API uses paths in the callback, so this must be Finder being stupid and resolving to inodes for its internal cache. A path linked to a specific inode disappears, so all entries linked to that inode disappear.

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That is probably the reason. Annoying stuff... Guess they fixed it in 10.5 – Svish Jul 29 '10 at 13:26
Or at least I hope so... – Svish Jul 29 '10 at 13:38
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