EC
ELOOP
Linux / POSIXERRORNotableFile SystemHIGH confidence

Too Many Levels of Symbolic Links

What this means

The kernel followed too many symbolic links while resolving a path, indicating a circular symlink chain. Linux gives up after 40 hops to prevent infinite loops. This almost always indicates a misconfigured deployment or packaging script.

Why it happens
  1. 1Two symlinks point to each other, creating an infinite loop.
  2. 2A chain of symlinks eventually circles back to a link already traversed.
  3. 3A deployment script created symlinks incorrectly, pointing to themselves.
How to reproduce

Two symbolic links that point to each other.

trigger — this will error
trigger — this will error
$ ln -s /tmp/loop-b /tmp/loop-a
$ ln -s /tmp/loop-a /tmp/loop-b
$ cat /tmp/loop-a/file.txt
cat: /tmp/loop-a/file.txt: Too many levels of symbolic links

expected output

cat: /tmp/loop-a/file.txt: Too many levels of symbolic links

Fix

Identify and remove circular symlinks

WHEN When resolving a path causes ELOOP

Identify and remove circular symlinks
# Find symlinks in /tmp and see where they point
find /tmp -type l -exec ls -la {} \;

# Use readlink to trace the chain
readlink -f /tmp/loop-a  # Will fail or show max depth reached

# Remove the circular link
rm /tmp/loop-b
ln -s /actual/target /tmp/loop-b

Why this works

Removing one link in the cycle breaks the loop, allowing path resolution to succeed.

Sources
Official documentation ↗

Linux Programmer Manual errno(3)

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