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I am using the latest Deepin 15.11 and have just discovered that I cannot access my Documents folder (/home/username/Documents). In my file manager (Deepin File Manager) it simply says "You do not have permission to access this folder."

When I try to navigate there via my terminal I get this:

bash: cd: Documents: Too many levels of symbolic links

So I did a little digging and discovered that the output of find -L ./ -mindepth 15 is as follows:

find: ‘./Documents’: Too many levels of symbolic links find: ‘./Templates’: Too many levels of symbolic links find: ‘./Public’: Too many levels of symbolic links find: File system loop detected; ‘./.steam/root’ is part of the same file system loop as ‘./.steam’.

Which seems to point to some other underlying symlink/permission issue. Attempting to change the ownership of the folder back to my username also fails due to the same "too many levels of symbolic links" error.

This is a fairly fresh install and I haven't done anything I would imagine could cause something like this.

Does anyone know how to resolve this without losing what was in my Documents folder? (assuming it's not already gone)

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    That find command is not producing any good output. Please try running find /home/$username -type l -exec ls -l {} \; and post the result in your question to show all of the symbolic links. Commented Dec 5, 2019 at 20:25
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    The output of the command you provided was: lrwxrwxrwx 1 sonar sonar 21 Nov 21 06:03 /home/sonar/Documents -> /home/sonar/Documents (sonar being my username) Commented Dec 5, 2019 at 20:31
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    That is a bad symbolic link, as it points to itself. You seem to have no Documents directory. Commented Dec 5, 2019 at 20:34
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    Is there any chance it was just somehow linked to itself, and that the symlink could be removed? If not, how do I just get rid of it and create a fresh Documents folder? Removing the directory doesn't work. Commented Dec 5, 2019 at 20:36
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    You are not showing what you are trying, just stating "it doesn't work" does not give anyone useful information to attempt to help you. To remove the symbolic link, try unlink /home/sonar/Documents. You should not have been able to create that symbolic link if there was an actual Documents directory there. Did you check that maybe you renamed the Documents directory to something else or maybe put it in a different directory? find / -type d -name *Documents* could help. Commented Dec 5, 2019 at 20:51

1 Answer 1

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It was suggested that I run find /home/$username/Documents -type l -exec ls -l {} \; which provided this output: lrwxrwxrwx 1 sonar sonar 18 Nov 21 06:03 /home/$username/Documents -> /home/$username/Documents

Turns out the Documents folder was symlinked to itself. Running unlink Documents completely resolved the issue and allowed me to access my Documents folder again with no issue. Thanks GracefulRestart!

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  • I wonder how it could had happened. Anyone has an idea? Commented Jun 17, 2020 at 21:29

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