How to remove a directory with “Too many levels of symlinks”

symlink

I have a bit of an odd problem on a RHEL system.

On our systems we have our home directory automounted under /export/home. There are a few exceptions, as I'm experimenting with using gluster for our home dirs. These are automounted under /gluster/home

This works on all our (30+) servers. Today this stopped working on one of them. I get the error: 

Too many levels of symlinks

when trying to cd into /gluster/home/$HOME…

I ended up temporary moving /gluster to /gluster_broken, and made a new /gluster/home, restarted autofs and things work again.

Now I want to remove /gluster_broken.

The problem is that aparently there is some symlink loop in /gluster_broken/home. I don't know where it came from. My attempts to get rid of it have been fruitless so far.

[root@dc1-03 /]# rm -rf gluster_broken/
rm: cannot remove `gluster_broken/home': Too many levels of symbolic links
[root@dc1-03 /]# rm -rf /gluster_broken/
rm: cannot remove `/gluster_broken/home': Too many levels of symbolic links
[root@dc1-03 /]# rm -rf /gluster_broken/home/
rm: cannot remove `/gluster_broken/home/': Is a directory
[root@dc1-03 /]# rm -rf /gluster_broken/home
rm: cannot remove `/gluster_broken/home': Too many levels of symbolic links
[root@dc1-03 /]# rmdir /gluster_broken/home/
rmdir: failed to remove `/gluster_broken/home/': Device or resource busy
[root@dc1-03 /]# fuser -m /gluster_broken/home/
Cannot stat /gluster_broken/home/: Too many levels of symbolic links
Cannot stat /gluster_broken/home/: Too many levels of symbolic links
Cannot stat /gluster_broken/home/: Too many levels of symbolic links
[root@dc1-03 /]# ls -ld /gluster_broken/home/
ls: cannot access /gluster_broken/home/: Too many levels of symbolic links
[root@dc1-03 /]# ls -ld /gluster_broken/home
drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 0 Jan 22 10:20 /gluster_broken/home
[root@dc1-03 /]# fuser -m /gluster_broken/home

As you can see most commands all yield the same error message. I would really like to get rid of this problem. But I'm a bit at a loss here. Any suggestions?

Output of suggested commands:

[root@dc1-03 /]# ls /gluster_broken/
home
[root@dc1-03 /]# ls /gluster_broken/home/
ls: cannot access /gluster_broken/home/: Too many levels of symbolic links
[root@dc1-03 /]# ls -hblF /gluster_broken /gluster_broken/home 
/gluster_broken:
total 0
drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 0 Feb  4 12:00 home/
ls: cannot open directory /gluster_broken/home: Too many levels of symbolic links

Best Answer

Try find.

find -L /gluster_broken -mindepth 10

to find the link loops

then a non recursive rm on the erroneous file(s)

find will follow links and find the same "too many levels" error. I use -mindepth to filter out anything less than 10 deep to avoid the ok files/directories. Yes, this does assume that you don't have more that 10 deep in your normal tree. All this command is trying to do is find the file in error.

-- edit

I think following command is better,

find -L /gluster_broken >/dev/null

Here's my test 

$ find .
.
./dira
./dira/a
./dira/dirb
./dira/dirb/dirc
./dira/error
./dira/b
./dira/test
./dira/test/ab&<cd.file
./dira/test/magic?newlines
./dira/test/cleanup
$ find -L . >/dev/null
find: ‘./dira/a’: Too many levels of symbolic links
find: ‘./dira/error’: Too many levels of symbolic links
find: ‘./dira/b’: Too many levels of symbolic links
$

--- edit 2

I think my suggestion (comment) to check file-system might be best, I have just seen this answer and wonder if you have a similar issue.

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