The system call that underlies rm is called unlink
(Now you know why.)
int result = unlink("blookus");
The kernel looks up the directory and the inode
It clobbers the directory entry
Big question:
Does it reclaim the disk blocks in which the data is stored?
(And does it put the inode back on the free-inode list?)
If there's another link to blookus, it better not scrub the data and the inode!
But how can it know without searching the whole filesystem?