unbelievably stupid mistake - i broke /usr/lib need help

[Alastair McKinley]

Peter Skensved wrote:

>   I would start by backing up /root, /boot, /etc and /var
>plus anything installed in /usr/local and /home . Next get a list of
>all installed RPMs ( rpm -qa | sort  or  rpm -a --qf "%{NAME}\n" | sort )
>and save them somewhere. With that information you can probably reconstruct
>your laptop if everything fails ( this assumes you always install binaries
>from RPM files and stuff from random tar files in /usr/local )
>
>  Once you have done that run  rpm -Va  and save the output. This
>will give you a list of missing files. Try installing the missing
>ones with  rpm -Uv --force  . If that works then heck for .rpmnew files
>and try reconstructing any munged configuration files.
>
> I've successfully done the above with a really clobbered file system 
>on a laptop. 
>
>
>                                                   peter
>----
>
>Peter Skensved                          Email : peter at SNO.Phy.QueensU.CA
>Dept. of Physics,
>Queen's University,
>Kingston, Ontario,
>Canada
>
>  
>
Hi Peter,

Thanks for your advice.  I managed to install enough libraries manually 
to get rpm up and running again.

What will the rpm -Uv --force command actually do?  I looked at the 
output of rpm -Va and it was shocking, it took about 3 minutes to finish!

Best regards,

Alastair