Delete default folders: Documents, Public, etc -- permanently?

Question

I do not use the folders ~/{Downloads, Documents, Public} and so I remove them. But some Mac OS X process keeps recreating them.

How can I disable the creation of these folders permanently? What process(es) are creating them?

Note: I do download files, e.g. from Safari, but they then go to a different directory. Safari allows this to be customized, so why can't the default directory be erased?

Note: I have run a crontab to delete these folders on a routine basis, however this is not a satisfactory solution especially since it needs to be run by root or an administrator.

Answer 1

It's definitively not recommended to remove these directories because a lot of applications just assume they are there. But it's your computer of course, so you can do with it whatever you like.

Instead of hunting down all applications/processes which might recreate these folders you could change their properties to make them invisible in Finder and inaccessible for everything :

chflags hidden ~/{Downloads,Documents,Public}
chmod 000 ~/{Downloads,Documents,Public}

Answer 2

When you buy a certain thing, say, a Mac, you accept its parts to a large degree. We tweak and fiddle and adapt it to our wants, especially here - I'm just saying, there's a limit. Leave the folder structure alone, let OS X be OS X, especially in ways that don't really hamper your use of it at all.