Subject: ls colors one symlink too much as non-broken in symlink chain
From: Martin Schulte <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2023 19:24:26 +0200
List-Id: <debbugs-submit.debbugs.gnu.org>

Hello coreutils-maintainers,

I create a long chain of symlinks - ls colors the 41st element as ok while the kernel already gives up after 40 symlinks:

$ uname -a
Linux martnix4 5.10.0-23-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 5.10.179-1 (2023-05-12) x86_64 GNU/Linux
$ ls --version | head -n 1
ls (GNU coreutils) 8.32
$ mkdir empty
$ cd empty
$ last=00 ; touch $last ; for ln in {01..50}; do ln -s $last $ln; last=$ln; done
$ ls --color -l {38..42}
lrwxrwxrwx 1 u g 2 Jun  6 19:00 38 -> 37   <- 38 colored as symlink
lrwxrwxrwx 1 u g 2 Jun  6 19:00 39 -> 38   <- 39 colored as symlink
lrwxrwxrwx 1 u g 2 Jun  6 19:00 40 -> 39   <- 40 colored as symlink
lrwxrwxrwx 1 u g 2 Jun  6 19:00 41 -> 40   <- 41 colored as symlink
lrwxrwxrwx 1 u g 2 Jun  6 19:00 42 -> 41   <- 42 and 41 colored as broken link
$ cat 40
$ cat 41
cat: 41: Too many levels of symbolic links

This could be reproduced with "ls (GNU coreutils) 9.3.45-6a618" compiled from the git repository.

Best regards,

Martin