MSS directories are not persistent. This means there are no
empty directories, and they will be automatically created as needed
and removed when empty. For example, if an MSS file with the name
/SIMPSONS/Bart/secretstuff exists, then the directories
/SIMPSONS and /SIMPSONS/Bart also exist.
If /SIMPSONS/Bart/secretstuff is removed, and
no other MSS files exist with /SIMPSONS/Bart as a
path prefix, then the directory /SIMPSONS/Bart will be
automatically removed.
At that point, if no other MSS files exist with /SIMPSONS as
a path prefix, then the directory /SIMPSONS will also
be automatically removed.
The MSS provides no low level commands to directly manipulate directories.
All of the commands described in this document that accept a directory name
as an argument may recursively descend the directory tree (some require the
-R option to be specified) to issue the appropriate
command on all MSS files contained within that tree. For example, the command:
msmv dir1 dir2
would cause thousands of individual move operations to take place if
dir1 contains thousands of MSS files. For
convenience from this point on, we will pretend that directories behave
as in the POSIX standard unless specifically noted.