Restoring from backup, preserving uids
lewis butler
lbutler+rsync at covisp.net
Sun Aug 10 06:04:16 GMT 2008
On 2-Aug-2008, at 13:15, Matt McCutchen wrote:
> On Sat, 2008-08-02 at 20:42 +0200, Paul Slootman wrote:
>> Just a note: I'd recommend also using -H to preserve hard links.
>> Traditionally a unix / linux system will have many files hard-linked
>> (although a quick check shows less than I expected).
>
> Do you know of any case in which breaking hard links makes a system
> work
> incorrectly (as opposed to just taking up more space)?
I think it can. For example, on many systems, vi is a hard link to
either nvi or vim. If you break the link, and then update, bad things
can happen as vi will invoke an old version of vim or nvi which might
possibly not work at all with the current libraries.
Another problem would likely be with bash and sh, since sh is often a
hard link to bash (at least on OS X it is). Having sh be a different
version is probably not a Good Thing.
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