irick@ecn.purdue.edu (GarBear Irick) (09/04/90)
Just curious.... Does anyone know how many levels of soft links I can use in 4.3BSD? Something like lns -s ONE TWO lns -s TWO ONE cat ONE gives the "too many levels of symbolic links" message. How far can we go??? -- Gary A. Irick, Purdue University | INTERNET: irick@en.ecn.purdue.edu | UUCP: ...!pur-ee!irick |
brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein) (09/04/90)
In article <1990Sep4.045427.2307@ecn.purdue.edu> irick@ecn.purdue.edu (GarBear Irick) writes: > Just curious.... Does anyone know how many levels of soft links I can use > in 4.3BSD? 20. [ ln -s ONE TWO; ln -s TWO ONE ] Infinity is larger than 20. ---Dan
cpcahil@virtech.uucp (Conor P. Cahill) (09/04/90)
In article <1990Sep4.045427.2307@ecn.purdue.edu> irick@ecn.purdue.edu (GarBear Irick) writes: > >Just curious.... Does anyone know how many levels of soft links I can use >in 4.3BSD? Something like A quick RTFM of the 4.3BSD Programmers manual reference guide states the following (on the intro(2) manual page): 62 ELOOP too many levels of symbolic links A path name lookup involved more than 8 symbolic links This code is in place to protect the system from the case you attempted to create: >lns -s ONE TWO >lns -s TWO ONE >cat ONE which otherwise would have gone on forever. -- Conor P. Cahill (703)430-9247 Virtual Technologies, Inc., uunet!virtech!cpcahil 46030 Manekin Plaza, Suite 160 Sterling, VA 22170
guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris) (09/05/90)
>Just curious.... Does anyone know how many levels of soft links I can use >in 4.3BSD? MAXSYMLINKS is 8, so it's about 8 levels in 4.3BSD and 4.3-tahoe. The number was cranked up to 20 in SunOS, and possibly in other systems that picked up the BSD code from Sun (it's probably 20 or more in S5R4 as well). >lns -s ONE TWO >lns -s TWO ONE >cat ONE > >gives the "too many levels of symbolic links" message. Not surprising, considering that it has, in effect, an *infinite* number of symbolic links....
jeff@onion.pdx.com (Jeff Beadles) (09/06/90)
irick@ecn.purdue.edu (GarBear Irick) writes: >Just curious.... Does anyone know how many levels of soft links I can use >in 4.3BSD? Something like Well, it can be configured by whomever builds the kernel. On the 4.2 BSD system here, it's 20. (in h/param.h, #define MAXSYMLINKS 20) Your mileage may vary. (Un?)fortunatly, the kernel code does not set this a variable that can be used. They just check against the define. (ie: if (++nlink > MAXSYMLINKS) { ... }) -Jeff -- Jeff Beadles jeff@onion.pdx.com jeff@quark.wv.tek.com