And unfortunately I cannot figure out any alternative, either. :-(
An interesting point is: why directory entries can be read but cannot be written? I mean we use Tcreate to create a new file in a dir, while to be uniform with files, we should use a Twrite, appending a corresponding stat structure at the end of a directory entry.
However this solution probably has not been adopted to enable safe concurrency in the file creation and removal.
However this asymmetry shows that directories cannot be (pratically) handled in the same way of files.
Giacomo