This is more a curiosity question than a problem. Try this: mkdir temp cd temp seq 1 30000 | xargs touch ls -lhd . find . -type f | xargs rm ls -lhd . Doing this on ext3 shows a 432k directory that stays that size even after the files are removed. It appears that ext3 practices lazy deletion, leaving the directory structures intact. It probably assumes that a directory that was large once will be large again, so it can save the allocation expense in the future.