Arch Linux

emacsomancer

Member

Registered: 2014-09-20

Posts: 211

/boot suddenly has "too many symbolic links" ??

Yesterday, I updated the system (i.e. pacman -Syyu), and when pacman tried to apply the linux-lts update it sent out a message:

warning: could not get filesystem information for /boot: Too many levels of symbolic links

And subsequently couldn't install the update.  Unsurprisingly, "cd /boot" or "ls boot" resulted in a similar messge about symbolic links.   I booted a livecd, and restored /boot from a backup, and reinstalled linus-lts after rebooting and it worked as normal.

But what could have caused this issue?  I haven't directly touched /boot myself since 'switching' from gummiboot to systemd-boot a few weeks ago, and pacman has successfully updated the linux kernel a few times since then.  So I'm somewhat perplexed about how /boot would have ended up with too many symbolic links.

Last edited by emacsomancer (2015-08-15 16:20:51)

karol

Archivist

Registered: 2009-05-06

Posts: 25,440

Re: /boot suddenly has "too many symbolic links" ??

Maybe you had a loop made of symbolic links?

Edit:
http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions … f-symlinks
http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions … olic-links

Last edited by karol (2015-08-15 16:25:52)

emacsomancer

Member

Registered: 2014-09-20

Posts: 211

Re: /boot suddenly has "too many symbolic links" ??

Maybe you had a loop made of symbolic links?

Edit:
http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions … f-symlinks
http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions … olic-links

But how would it have arisen?  Pacman has been the only one editing /boot recently.

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 29,567

Website

Re: /boot suddenly has "too many symbolic links" ??

This isn't really a Kernel or Hardware issue.  Moving to NC for lack of a better place.

emacsomancer, there really is no way to diagnose a past isolated incident.  Anything at all would be pure speculation.  If it happens again, then we could really look into it, but if it was just once, it's likely the result of an fstab error or an unintended/accidental use of a bad mount command.

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"UNIX is simple and coherent..." - Dennis Ritchie, "GNU's Not UNIX" -  Richard Stallman

DarkCerberus

Banned

From: Holsworthy, Devon

Registered: 2011-12-31

Posts: 252

Re: /boot suddenly has "too many symbolic links" ??

I don't know if this helps but here's a useful link http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-remo … k-command/   - you can use the "unlink" command to remove system links though do it with caution....

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