Re: Recursion level of symlinks limitted to five?

Ruben Schattevoy (schattev@imb-jena.de)
Tue, 09 Mar 1999 09:29:33 +0100

Cameron Simpson wrote:
>
> 8 used to be a common default, and that was pretty frustrating
> sometimes. 5 is insanely low. 16 or 32 is much more reasonable. There
> was discussion (comp.sys.unix? I forget) some years back about
> alternatives (like real loop detection and non-linear methods which
> used log2(n) instead of n space consumption) as this limit was really
> in the (BSD) kernel to serve as a primitive loop detector, not as a
> hack to preserve stack space.
>

Could somebody tell me what to change in the kernel sources -
I guess it's just a #define statement - to try and see whether
I safely can increase it to, say, 8 in my production
environment?

> Argh. Overuse of symlinks is certainly bad, but a chain limit of 5 is
> mega-overly-conservative.

If you go an solve a big problem by breaking down the task into
smaller pieces which in turn can recursively break themself down
into smaller pieces you quite naturally end up with a situation
where you need a bigger number of recursions in symlinks. From
my point of via a statement like saying that recursive symlinks
are not a good programming style does not reflect much of good
programming practice.

Ruben

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