Finder folder deletion bug

Question

OK, I've had it with this problem. It has bitten me several times over the years.
Imagine that you have a folder of documents and folders. You use a keyboard command (cmd-delete) to delete one folder after having looked in the folder in column view.
Most times this works fine and only the intended folder is deleted. Several times, including today, the parent folder gets deleted unintentionally.
I have caught it before emptying the trash several times, but again today, it removed the parent folder.
So, is there a magic bullet to prevent this or some traceable way to report it to Apple?
MacBook CD 1.83   Mac OS X (10.4.8)   All OS updates as of posting.

Answer 1

This is a known issue - one of the many downgrades in Finder usability that occurred from 10.3 to 10.4. It's most commonly a sidebar / column view issue. Not a bug exactly, but a sloppy / inconsistent implementation.
If you click on a folder in the sidebar in any view other than column view, the window has focus, but the folder whose contents are displayed in the window is not "selected". Hitting Cmd-delete won't do anything because nothing is selected.
However, if you click a folder in the sidebar while the window is in column, the folder whose contents are displayed is "selected". In this case, if you put a folder in the sidebar, set the window to column view, click on that folder and hit Cmd-delete, it will be moved to the Trash. The window itself won't appear to change, and apart from a momentary flicker of the "File" menu, it won't appear as if anything has happened at all. Emptying the Trash at this point erases the data permanently. The OS X dialogue for emptying the Trash is uninformative compared to its pre-OS X counterpart, further reducing the chances of catching the error.
The reason this occurs is because column view shows multiple levels of the file hierarchy in the same window. When a folder in the sidebar is clicked, it displays the hierarchy as if it were rooted at the folder whose contents are displayed in the window. But it acts as if it were showing you the whole hierarchy, beginning at "Computer". If the whole path is represented in the window, then the folder whose contents are displayed in the rightmost column is inherently "selected". With the view rooted in the current folder, the current folder itself is not visible, so you would never see that it is selected, as it is in 10.4.
It's an inconsistency in selection behaviour between column view vs list and icon view. Many people have lost data over this. My workaround is to avoid putting folders into the sidebar, and that's that. The "home" folder should be safe for non-admin users because of permissions, and the "Desktop" because it is usually "in use" by the Finder. Anything else will have to be "locked" (in which case you can't modify the top level) or else the write access to it's parent would have to be removed, in order to be safe.