'ls' hangs FC6
Joe Smith
jes at martnet.com
Wed Apr 9 21:15:52 UTC 2008
Mark Haney wrote:
> And yes /bin/ls --color=tty hangs. In fact, I changed it to color=auto
> and THAT hangs as well. I changed the ls alias to be just 'ls' and that
> works fine for all directories that were hanging before. But now, ls
> -l hangs too. Man, this is weird.
Both colorizing the names based on the file type and getting the file
metadata for a long listing require reading each file's inode, whereas
'ls' showing only the name requires only reading the directory data.
I can't tell you why that should make a difference, except that the
directory data may be in cache somewhere, and the inode data are not. If
the disk has gone AWOL in the meantime, then ls will hang waiting to
read the inode data.
In any case, it's not really so weird that you get different behavior
when using the options: they do quite different things behind the curtain.
<Joe
More information about the users
mailing list