On Mon, 22 Apr 2002, Tim Pierce wrote:

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rm accept ln dist accept

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Any ideas how the file may have become unlinked in the first place?

The most common cause in my experience is when someone edits the dist or accept file with emacs or some other editor that doesn't pay attention to hardlinks by default. Emacs's natural behavior is to make a backup of the file you're editing by renaming it to filename~, then creating a new file in its place. Vi, pico and some other editors make backup files by copying rather than renaming, which avoids this particular problem.

Then ln -s dist accept will avoid such problem better, I think. Zhiliang