On my RH7 system I had removed /var/www/cgi-bin and 
/var/www/html that came with apache. So when installing the new 
apache package, I thought to try the following command:

    rpm -Fvh --excludepath /var/www/cgi-bin \
        --excludepath /var/www/html \
        apache-1.3.14-3.i386.rpm apache-devel-1.3.14-3.i386.rpm

However RPM crashed and coredumped (not a comforting thing in 
the middle of an upgrade). Same behavior with the -U flag. I added a 
few v's and it died after:

    D: getting list of mounted filesystems

So it hadn't actually changed anything yet it seems.
Without the --excludepath it worked fine.