[salgernon]

Because some large percentage of candidates can't handle pointers. If you can't come up with a viable "delete a node from the middle of a linked list" during an interview where you are supposed to program in c then you don't get the job. No, you probably won't need to implement a linked list, but you will need to dereference pointers, and the linked list is an adequate proxy for your ability to understand the most fundamental of systems programming tasks.

[Aloisius]

Pfft. I feel like I could teach pointers to someone who had a firm grasp of any iterative language in less than 15 minutes.

Heck, I'm pretty sure I could teach pointers to someone who has only worked in matlab occasionally by cut-and-pasting others code in less than 30.

And teaching someone something new during an interview and seeing if they can understand it and then turn around and use it is far more valuable for interviewing the types of people I want to hire than asking them random questions they could find the answer to on google in less than a minute.

[jimmaswell]

    void delete_nodes(struct node n) {
     if (n.next)
      delete_nodes(n->next);
     free(n.next);
    }

like that?