Weird that there is such detailed technical information alongside this statement:

> And anyway, purists might argue that the "content" of a directory doesn't change when the files it points to change; the content is merely a list of filenames and inode numbers, after all, and those stay the same, no matter what happens inside those inodes. Purists make me sad.

Or maybe Unix makes the author sad? You can’t wish the OS into doing something different with directory files when the set of contained files has not changed (but a file was modified) so that these Make troubles could be handled differently.

Am I missing something?