how to solve “bad interpreter: Too many levels of symbolic links”

Question

I am trying to install numpy in a virtual environment that I created. I used the following series of commands to create and activate and then installing a local version of n

Answer 1

I can vaguely speculate that the reason for this is that you have a virtualenv pointing to itself. I can further vaguely speculate that this would happen if you attempt to create a virtualenv, but then somehow decide to do it again without running deactivate. Then you have python in the virtualenv pointing back to ... python in (effectively) the same virtualenv by a symbolic link.

Since this is speculative, I hope someone who actually has this problem can confirm or deny that this is what happened.

Anyway, if this is the case, the other answers here saying remove the env and start over are basically correct, but remember to deactivate first.