ELOOP help needed

Lou Grinzo (lgrinzo@stny.lrun.com)
Sun, 6 Jun 1999 12:39:59 -0400


I'm trying to track down a specific detail about how Linux handles circular
link
references. I know that certain system calls will return [-]ELOOP when this
condition is detected, but I need a little more information:

I've seen descriptions that say only a certain number of links will be
followed
before Linux will assume it has a circular reference and give up and
return ELOOP. Is this true? If so, what's the limit? Is the limit hard-
coded, or can it be overridden programmatically?

I found in the Linux source browser one spot that returns ELOOP, at
http://metalab.unc.edu/navigator-bin/navigator.cgi?fs/ext2/symlink.c, in
function ext2_follow_link. This seems to indicate pretty clearly that the
count
is hardwired to 5, at least for ext2. Is this correct? Has it always been
5?

Since I need this information for a technical edit of a published article,
and I'm on a very tight deadline, I would appreciate replies directly to
my e-mail address, lgrinzo@stny.lrun.com, if possible.

Thanks in advance.

Lou

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