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