Dr Jan’s Tips From The Top

Sometimes you can find yourself in symlinking hell when you’ve inadvertently created a loop of links, where link A refers to file B, and file B is another link back to A, for example.

You can use the GNU version of ‘find’ to discover where the link loops are. This information is from a bug report here.

Note that this doesn’t work if you have version 4.2.19 of find. You can check the version with rpm, assuming you are using an rpm-based Linux distribution (RedHat anything, CentOS, etc.).

‘rpm -q findutils’ should show the current version.

find . -follow

find: Symbolic link 'some/path/or/another' is
part of a loop in the directory hierarchy;
we have already visited the directory to which it points.

Once you have found the location of the loop you can manually fix things

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 2nd, 2006 @ 15:18 on the category unix.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.