Hello Paul, hello Pádraig,
thanks a lot for your analysis and explanations!
> With that in mind, the code change you proposed is reasonably innocuous,
> although it slows things down a bit in the usual case. Not sure it's
> worth doing (I guess it does fix a race but there are other unfixable
> races in this area....).
I first supposed that the effect was caused by an off-by-one problem, but after
understanding it, I think you are right here to ask if changing the behaviour
is worth doing.
Looking at
$ ls {38..42}
ls: cannot access '41': Too many levels of symbolic links
ls: cannot access '42': Too many levels of symbolic links
38 39 40
shows that there would be more issues to consider in this case.
Martin
