Viewing a directory with a symlink cycle causes Nautilus to crash. As Linux raises an ELOOP error in this condition, I assume Nautilus is not opening the symlink using a standard 'open', but instead manually following symlinks, with no limit on the number of times it will follow them.

To reproduce:

$ mkdir looptest; cd looptest
$ touch foo
$ ln -s foo bar
$ rm foo
$ ln -s bar foo
$ ls -l
total 8
lrwxrwxrwx 1 matt matt 84 2010-04-16 11:07 bar -> foo
lrwxrwxrwx 1 matt matt 84 2010-04-16 11:07 foo -> bar
$ cat foo
cat: foo: Too many levels of symbolic links
$ nautilus .

This crashes Nautilus as it loads.

I examined the crash in GDB. The stack trace is about 178575 frames long and then it SIGSEGVs. The majority of the stack trace is a cycle between three functions (which I can't see because I don't have source on). This implies that it's simply following the symlinks manually forever until a stack overflow.