Facing the Beginning of Infinity

I'm learning why symlinks aren't always such a good idea. I use them in my home directory on my GNU/Linux desktop and always thought they were helpful. But they also have made it impossible to use scp easily to get my stuff copied over to my Mac while I switch GNU/Linux distributions. I have a few symlinks that I haven't found yet that must recursively link around to most of my files because my 7 GB home directory took over 14 GB on my Mac and it wasn't done copying. In other words, scp was copying deeper and deeper into the recursive links that go back and forth and everytime it would go into a “deeper version” of directory A, it would find a link to directory B and in directory B it would find A or maybe C which then links back to A. Ad infinitum.

So now, I must go through each directory in search of symlinks that might cause trouble. So much for saving time. I've gotten a lot copied over, but there is still some work to do. Hopefully I'll be running Mandrake Linux 10 or Fedora Core 2 within a few days. I might start off with Fedora and then decide which way to go. We'll see.