That's interesting about the access permissions and ownership; I thought that access permissions in POSIX were path-dependent. Some quick experimentation indic

That's interesting about the access permissions and ownership; I thought that access permissions in POSIX were path-dependent. Some quick experimentation indicates that ownership and access does in fact apply across hard links. There's still some truth to the path-dependent notion, in that you may not be able to access a file through a hard link in a directory that you do not have access to, even if you have access to that same hard link through another path. But if you don't have access to the file itself then you're out of luck. This does make sense from a security perspective, but I thought that the path-dependent checks in the kernel were strong enough to not require inode-associated ACLs. You're right about restoring the file by re-linking to the hard link, but you can access the contents and cp it out of proc at least.