"Olson, Arthur David (NCI)" scripsit:
What I'm after is something that handles such real-world cases correctly; I'm willing to let non-real-world cases slide.
Almost anything could be a real-world case, given the tangles of symbolic links that are often used for backward compatibility. I got into considerable trouble with a program that rewrote /etc/aliases on a system in which that was a symlink for /etc/mail/aliases. I strongly recommend copying. Disk space is cheap, copy times are quick, typically only one file (the one in /etc) is affected. And it works every time. -- John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com> http://www.reutershealth.com I amar prestar aen, han mathon ne nen, http://www.ccil.org/~cowan han mathon ne chae, a han noston ne 'wilith. --Galadriel, _LOTR:FOTR_