Apparently, though unproven, at 14:51 on Monday 01 November 2010, Harry Putnam did opine thusly:
> Alan McKinnon <alan.mckin...@gmail.com> writes: > > > [...] > > >> > What shell are you using? > >> > What is the output of "echo $HOME"? > >> > >> My shell is xterm... and was just updated to: > >> Wed Oct 27 10:15:06 2010 >>> x11-terms/xterm-262 > > > > That's the terminal. > > > > What shell do you use/ > > Sorry... still asleep... bash-4.1_p9 > > > Willie Wong <ww...@math.princeton.edu> writes: > > [...] > > > Before we go further, when you said `ls' will not complete against > > $HOME, which of the following scenario did you mean? > > > > a) you typed `ls $HOME' as a user (the one I think Alan thinks you > > > > mean) > > > > b) you type `ls' while in your home directory (/home/reader) > > c) you typed `ls /home/reader' ? > > All three of those produce the same effect. Also if run from root > shell against my users home `# ls /home/reader' > > The command just hangs there as described. > > However, as indicated earlier... my user or root can run `ls' against > any other directory like normal. > > ls /etc > > Shows the content of /etc > > ls /home/reader > > Hangs eternally. > > Also, as mentioned, I can view /home/reader with emacs in dired > (directory) mode, Which oddly enough uses ls and ls switches for that > display far as I know. > > However, vim will not display /home/reader... and > hangs eternally... requiring the shell to be killed. > > Viewing $HOME with emacs shows nothing untoward that I see. I thought > maybe I'd somehow acquired thousands of files and `ls' was just taking > forever to display the list... but no... nothing unusual in $HOME. I suspect directory corruption in /home - is it a separate partition? I don't recall if you mentioned this or not, do you get the same result if you run "ls $HOME" as root? root's home dir is not on /home so that will vbe a valuable clue. If that command works, do an fsck on /home -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
