max symlink = 5? ?bug? ?feature deficit?

From: Linda Walsh
Date: Fri Feb 10 2006 - 22:29:36 EST


The maximum number of followed symlinks seems to be set to 5.

This seems small when compared to other filesystem limits.
Is there some objection to it being raised? Should it be
something like Glib's '20' or '255'?

It would involve a change in include/namei.h and perhaps
a cleanup of the comment (which states the limit is '8') in
namei.c

There is some confusion with the shell utilities thinking
some links are valid, but other utilities giving an error:

> readlink -f cpu/args.t
/usr/src/packages/BUILD/perl-5.8.6/t/op/args.t
> cat cpu/args.t
cat: cpu/args.t: Too many levels of symbolic links
> namei cpu/args.t
f: cpu/args.t
d cpu
l args.t -> ../op/args.t
d ..
l op -> ../t/op/
d ..
l t -> perldir/t
l perldir -> perl-5.8.6
l perl-5.8.6 -> ../build/perl-5.8.6
d ..
l build -> BUILD
d BUILD
d perl-5.8.6
d t
d op
- args.t

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