This depends on your design decisions!

Looks like you have a bidirectional membership relation, implemented with references (which isn't the only way to do it, see below)

If I were you I'd first think hard about the membership semantics you want and consequently how deletion is supposed to work.

What are your desired N to M relations ?

• can files "belong" to more or less than one directory?
• can directories belong to other directories ? Even more than one?
• are directories allowed to be empty?

And after that deletion semantics

• do you want explicit and/or implicit (ref count) deletion of objects?
• what should happen to the "members" after a directory is "deleted" or destroyed
• what should happen to the "containers" after a directory or file is "deleted" or destroyed

Most of us have more or less similar answers based on experience with filesystem operations, but yours might be different. But FS differ and some have inodes, symlinks, hardlinks, etc...

Furthermore: as indicated, you don't necessarily need to use (circular) references to design this relation. Like with symbols for references

So you could also have class variables'%instance' collecting objects for each class (i.e. all files, all directories) with identifiers as keys and object references as values. (A possible natural unique ID is just the stringification of the reference plus timestamp)

Just store the related IDs now in the objects

Of course you'll have to design the necessary delete or DESTROY methods now on your own, to clean up broken relations after an object is deleted.

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