Just for interest, on Debian Lenny/Testing usig ext3...

zippy:~/scripts/tmp$ uname -a
Linux zippy 2.6.18-4-amd64 #1 SMP Mon Mar 26 11:36:53 CEST 2007 x86_64
+ GNU/Linux
zippy:~/scripts/tmp$ time perl -e 'for (1..100_000) { open my $f, ">",
+ $_ or die $! }'

real    9m21.670s
user    0m2.480s
sys     9m8.294s
zippy:~/scripts/tmp$ time perl -le 'unlink 1..100_000'

real    0m1.819s
user    0m0.064s
sys     0m1.428s
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