Too many symbolic links error

Question

I am attempting to use LFS to make my own distro (for fun, nothing important) but keep running into issues. As it suggests, I am running a non-admin user account. However, every time I attempt to untar something it returns these errors:

tar (child): bzip2: Cannot exec: Too many levels of symbolic links
tar (child): Error is not recoverable: exiting now
tar: Child returned status 2
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

Also, when I try to run mkdir, I get this error

mkdir: cannot create directory '/tools/lib': Too many levels of symbolic links

Any ideas? If it helps, I am working on a separate partition mounted under '/mnt/lfs', and I can access it through $LFS (by running export LFS=/mnt/lfs) but I always access it through cding to /mnt/lfs.

Thanks in advance for the help

Solution

In my case, when I had correctly chown'd the directories, somehow I ended up having the this happen when doing an ls -la of /

lrwxrwxrwx   1 root root    11 Jun 13 01:44 tools -> tools/

Once I completed the following, I was able to unpack bin-utils and go on my way to making the LFS.

sudo su
cd /
rm tools
ln -s /mnt/tools/ tools 

Comments

[TransitGuru]

I forgot to mention that in my case, $LFS was /mnt/