When it was first released, Mac OS X had an odd problem: it allowed a user to create files that they couldn’t delete. This wound up having to do with a bug between way OS 9 could “lock” files colliding with the way OS X did something similar. You could fix this on the command line, but I got sick of doing so, so built some quick utilities to handle this just by dragging and dropping.
One of these, DropUnlock, is still available, but today DivNull is officially discontinuing DropNuke. As you would expect with something named “DropNuke”, this version of the utility was pretty much the final option, a scorched earth way of permanently dealing with an undeletable file (using not only chflags calls, but also rm -rf). As you can tell by the warnings on its old download page, you could wreak a lot of havoc with DropNuke if you didn’t know what you are doing.
Since the “undeletable file” problem has been addressed in subsequent versions of OS X, and DropUnlock still exists for people still using the old version, it seems smarter to remove DropNuke, just in case.
Update: The technology on which DropNuke and DropUnlock was built doesn’t run on modern versions of OS X, so neither of these scripts will work any longer.
Please, NO! I LOVE DropNuke! It not only deletes large numbers of files MUCH faster than emptying the trash, but allows me to delete files even while the Trash is being securely emptied — which I find I want to do fairly often. I’ve gotten in the habit of using a web spider (Pandora) to gather large numbers of images, then go through and delete 90% of them that I don’t want. This sometimes leads to LOTS of files to delete, and DropNuke made it quick and easy. I don’t know of any other program that does this; before DropNuke, I used a System 8 program called Burn to do the same thing, but it’s long outdated. If you would PLEASE update as needed to work with Lion, I would be happy to pay to make DropNuke an ongoing program. You have my gratitude for the many, many times it has helped me out!