Interesting thought. I can envision how a lookup for /var/xyz could cause everything under /var to be looked up, and I can see how /var/cache or /var/run would be frequently read. I'll try mounting a green USB drive's file system at a third-level directory (e.g., /var/backups/0) or under a less popular directory (e.g., /mnt/backups) and see if that behaves any differently.
Thanks, Dave
On 2/12/20 7:11 AM, Tim via users wrote:
On Tue, 2020-02-11 at 19:53 -0600, Dave Ulrick wrote:
I'm logged in as a non-root user with my home directory as my current working directory. The file system containing my home directory is mounted at /home. I'm using a shell prompt via a graphical terminal emulator (xfce4-terminal, in my case). Now, I enter an 'ls' command at a bash prompt. The output doesn't appear until after my USB hard drive spins up. Note that neither /var/backups nor any directory under it is in my shell's PATH, nor is there any symlink to /var/backups in my current working directory. Thus, there should be no need to read /var/backups, yet evidently this exactly what happens.
Just a stab in the dark: Is something poking about /var/run or /var/cache? Perhaps that's enough to look through /var. I wonder if you could try another terminal program, just to see if it's the terminal, itself.
Maybe strace ls, to see what it's up to.
I know with GUI programs, I had to move mountable thing to be inside a sub-directory of my homespace. Otherwise, anything that listed ~/ would wake up the drives to count the number of files in them. So, I feel your pain.