Restoring missing pieces

[vodhner at cox.net]

I am trying to recover a CentOS 4 system that is mostly working but is missing some pieces.

When the box came to me, I stumbled on the fact that the passwd command was missing, though it had been used recently.  When I obtained a replacement copy (which might not have been correct for this CentOS version), it gave me this message:

    passwd: error while loading shared libraries: libuser.so.1:
        cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Of course I could rebuild the whole system, no big deal.  But the /home tree and other things are all in the root filesystem and I'd like to keep that stuff.  Is there some way I could use yum for example, to do an override restore of the basic system?

Thanks,

Vic