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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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NAMEI(1)						      General Commands Manual							  NAMEI(1)

NAME
namei - follow a pathname until a terminal point is found SYNOPSIS
namei [-mx] pathname [ pathname ... ] DESCRIPTION
Namei uses its arguments as pathnames to any type of Unix file (symlinks, files, directories, and so forth). Namei then follows each path- name until a terminal point is found (a file, directory, char device, etc). If it finds a symbolic link, we show the link, and start fol- lowing it, indenting the output to show the context. This program is useful for finding a "too many levels of symbolic links" problems. For each line output, namei outputs a the following characters to identify the file types found: f: = the pathname we are currently trying to resolve d = directory l = symbolic link (both the link and it's contents are output) s = socket b = block device c = character device - = regular file ? = an error of some kind Namei prints an informative message when the maximum number of symbolic links this system can have has been exceeded. OPTIONS
-x Show mount point directories with a 'D', rather than a 'd'. -m Show the mode bits of each file type in the style of ls(1), for example 'rwxr-xr-x'. AUTHOR
Roger Southwick (rogers@amadeus.wr.tek.com) BUGS
To be discovered. CAVEATS
Namei will follow an infinite loop of symbolic links forever. To escape, use SIGINT (usually ^C). SEE ALSO
ls(1), stat(1) Local NAMEI(1)
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