Dear Maintainer, when creating an empty byte, making a hard link and adding content to the copy, the files are still hard-linked. With non-empty files it works as expected. Example: $ cow bash $ touch foo $ cp -l foo bar $ ls -l foo bar -rw-r--r-- 2 fritsche fritsche 0 Apr 14 17:05 bar -rw-r--r-- 2 fritsche fritsche 0 Apr 14 17:05 foo $ echo foo >> foo $ ls -l foo bar -rw-r--r-- 2 fritsche fritsche 4 Apr 14 17:05 bar -rw-r--r-- 2 fritsche fritsche 4 Apr 14 17:05 foo $ echo foo >> foo $ ls -l foo bar -rw-r--r-- 1 fritsche fritsche 4 Apr 14 17:05 bar -rw-r--r-- 1 fritsche fritsche 8 Apr 14 17:06 foo