TTL

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TTL or Time to live is a number used to prevent data from circulating indefinitely.

For each hop in a network the data passes through, the TTL value is decreased by one; when it reaches zero, the packet of data is discarded. In this way, endless loops are broken (such as host A sending data to host B sending data to host C sending data back to host A).

The default TTL value between operating systems differs, but it may not be greater than 255.