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Full Discussion: Too many levels of symbolic links
Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers Too many levels of symbolic links Post 40625 by Perderabo on Friday 19th of September 2003 11:21:06 AM
Old 09-19-2003
You can have many symbolic links in a filesystem. The limiting factor is how many inodes are available. That is not the problem. You have too many symbolic links for this particular pathname.

Suppose the system tries to open a file called "a". But it finds that "a" is a symbolic link to "b". The system then must open "b". But "b" is a symbolic link to "c". Now the system must open "c". And "c" could be a symbolic link to "d" and so on. The system must reach a real file or directory after 32 tries. If not, the open will fail.

32 is a lot. I'll bet you have a loop. Something like this:

ln -s a b
ln -s b a
vi a
 

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LEARN ABOUT HPUX

symlink

symlink(4)						     Kernel Interfaces Manual							symlink(4)

NAME

       symlink - symbolic link

DESCRIPTION

       A symbolic (or soft ) link is a file whose name indirectly refers (points) to a relative or absolute path name.

       During  path  name  interpretation,  a symbolic link to a relative path name is expanded to the path name being interpreted, and a symbolic
       link to an absolute path name is replaced with the path name being interpreted.

       Thus, given the path name

	      If is a symbolic link to a relative path name such as the path name is interpreted as

	      If is a symbolic link to an absolute path name such as the path name is interpreted as

       All symbolic links are interpreted in this manner, with one exception: when the symbolic link is the last component of a path name,  it	is
       passed  as  a  parameter  to  one of the system calls: or (see readlink(2), rename(2), symlink(2), unlink(2), chown(2) and lstat(2)).  With
       these calls, the symbolic link, itself, is accessed or affected.

       Unlike normal (hard) links, a symbolic link can refer to any arbitrary path name and can span different logical devices (volumes).

       The path name can be that of any type of file (including a directory or another symbolic link), and may be invalid if no such  path  exists
       in  the	system.   (It is possible to make symbolic links point to themselves or other symbolic links in such a way that they form a closed
       loop.  The system detects this situation by limiting the number of symbolic links it traverses while translating a path name.)

       The mode and ownership of a symbolic link is ignored by the system, which means that affects the actual file, but not the  file	containing
       the symbolic link (see chmod(1)).

       Symbolic links can be created using or (see ln(1) and symlink(2)).

AUTHOR

       was developed by HP and the University of California, Berkeley.

SEE ALSO

       cp(1), symlink(2), readlink(2), link(2), stat(2), mknod(1M).

																	symlink(4)
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