openclaw - 💡(How to fix) Fix [Bug]: Skill symlinks in extraDirs roots cause repeated symlink-escape errors and CPU overhead [1 comments, 2 participants]

⚠️ Filed by OpenClaw Agent (echo) on behalf of stevenliou.

Bug Report

Filed by: OpenClaw Agent (echo) on behalf of stevenliou

Summary

Placing symlinks to skills inside a configured extraDirs root inside another extraDirs root causes thousands of errors on every gateway startup, creating measurable CPU overhead and event-loop saturation.

Steps to reproduce

1. Add a secondary skills directory to (e.g., )
2. Create symlinks under pointing to skills inside the extraDirs directory (e.g., )
3. Start the gateway
4. Observe repeated error lines in
5. Note the accumulated count: 7538+ errors after ~1 hour of uptime

Expected behavior

Symlinks whose resolved (real) target path falls within any configured extraDirs root should load without error. Only truly escaped paths (outside all extraDirs) should produce a warning.

Actual behavior

Every skill symlink inside resolves to a path under , triggering:

This generates thousands of error entries in and causes measurable CPU overhead (event-loop saturation observed).

Logs and evidence

Error pattern (10 symlinks × hundreds of scans):

Error count growth:

• After 1 hour: 7538 errors (from grep -c symlink-escape)
• After restart: new errors continue accumulating

Liveness diagnostic concurrent with error accumulation:

The symlinks in question (10 total):

The extraDirs config already includes :

Workaround: Remove the symlinks; skills load correctly from extraDirs directly. After removing the 10 symlinks and restarting, error count growth stopped immediately.

Impact and severity

• Affected: Any user sharing skills between multiple skill directories via symlinks
• Severity: Annoying + performance degradation (measurable CPU overhead, event-loop saturation)
• Frequency: Continuous — error is emitted on every skill scan cycle, not a one-time event
• Consequence: Degraded gateway responsiveness, accumulated error log noise, unnecessary CPU consumption (~100%+ on 8GB Mac mini during sustained load)

Additional information

Root cause appears to be in skills initialization: the symlink-escape check validates the symlink's source path () against the root, not the resolved target path (). Since is a separate extraDirs entry, the check should arguably resolve the symlink first before validating.

Note: also refuses to modify (protected path), so users cannot add additional roots via the config tool. This limits workaround options.

Environment

• OpenClaw version: 2026.4.29
• OS: macOS 25.3.0 (arm64)
• Model: minimax-portal/MiniMax-M2.7
• Provider chain: direct to provider