Restoring from backup, preserving uids

[Matt McCutchen]

On Sun, 2008-08-10 at 00:04 -0600, lewis butler wrote: 
> On 2-Aug-2008, at 13:15, Matt McCutchen wrote:
> > 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.

On my Fedora 9 system, vi and vim are different binaries and there is no
nvi.  I scanned for all multiply-linked files on the root filesystem,
and except for some system-config-network files that I'm not using any
more, all the links to each file came from the same RPM package, so RPM
would presumably update the links correctly.

> 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.

On my brother's OS X system, sh and bash are different binaries.

Matt
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