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I've seen a few different questions about ls hanging. It's usually because they use the -l switch, which causes a stat on the file, which in turn is a bad symlink or pointing to an NFS mount or some such.

I have a local file (in an old copy of the Git source that somebody else unpacked, of all things) that causes stat to hang, but responds to CTRL-C. It also causes ls -l to hang, hard, such that it does not respond to kill (but does terminate on a kill -9).

It's not a symlink. The other files in the directory appear to stat without issue. I've recently rebooted the machine with forced fsck, which came out clean, and dmesg shows no disk-related messages. How can this be?

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It may be a problem in getting the user name or group name, if you use and LDAP or NIS or other sources for that. What are you passwd and group lines in /etc/nsswitch.conf? This may be the case if an ls -nl return immediately.

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Unless it is looking for extra sources for that data when something isn't found, it would hang all the time (i.e., get the name, return it; don't get it, return anyway). Isn't too plausible. Perhaps the file is somehow messed up (and a fsck(8) might be in order)? – vonbrand Jan 30 at 13:04
Right, but he might have long timeouts. So this is still a possibility. – eppesuig Jan 30 at 13:16
I said not plausible, not that it was out of question. – vonbrand Jan 30 at 13:35
Some other ridiculous ideas: A symlink to somewhere strange? stat (no switches) say anything? – vonbrand Jan 30 at 13:37
The crazy part is that stat hangs after printing that this is a normal file, nothing to see here, move along. Closes with a ctrl-C though. – Coderer Jan 30 at 16:02
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