Bizarre ls Behavior
I mounted the iso image of a FreeBSD UNIX file system on a
Debian platform in order to look at it. That's when I discovered the
oddity. There is a bin directory referenced to the root of the CDROM.
If I am in that directory as myself (normal user account), I get
absolutely nothing if I do ls. My first thought was that bin was
empty. I then did
find . -name "*" -print and all the files one would normally
associate with /bin were listed. If I became superuser, I could list
/bin by actually going there and doing ls. Nothing at all looks weird
about this directory. If I am myself, I can cd to /cdrom and do ls
bin and see all the files. I just can't produce any output if I do ls
from within bin. I can even be specific and ls a file such as cat or date and
I still get nothing.
I thought it might be permission-related so I used cpio to
regenerate a whole new copy of that CDROM in a read/write file system
so I could play with the bits. I did chmod 777 on the whole file tree
and I still couldn't produce any output from ls, ls -l or ls -a. It's
not permissions.
Other directories seem normal. What could possibly be going
on here? Here is a listing of what is in bin. There is a file named
[ but that is the only strange thing in the listing and it is not
causing the behavior:
total 5346
-r-xr-xr-x 4 root root 54640 Jan 21 09:45 [
-r-xr-xr-x 2 root root 69076 Jan 21 09:45 cat
-r-xr-xr-x 2 root root 60760 Jan 21 09:45 chio
-r-xr-xr-x 2 root root 66348 Jan 21 09:45 chmod
-r-xr-xr-x 2 root root 70708 Jan 21 09:45 cp
-r-xr-xr-x 4 root root 651868 Jan 21 09:45 csh
-r-xr-xr-x 2 root root 190756 Jan 21 09:45 date
-r-xr-xr-x 2 root root 79548 Jan 21 09:45 dd
-r-xr-xr-x 2 root root 63028 Jan 21 09:45 df
-r-xr-xr-x 2 root root 51524 Jan 21 09:45 domainname
-r-xr-xr-x 2 root root 48080 Jan 21 09:45 echo
-r-xr-xr-x 4 root root 144816 Jan 21 09:45 ed
-r-xr-xr-x 2 root root 103808 Jan 21 09:45 expr
-r-xr-xr-x 2 root root 51620 Jan 21 09:45 hostname
-r-xr-xr-x 2 root root 52972 Jan 21 09:45 kill
-r-xr-xr-x 4 root root 52996 Jan 21 09:45 link
-r-xr-xr-x 4 root root 52996 Jan 21 09:45 ln
-r-xr-xr-x 2 root root 301376 Jan 21 09:45 ls
-r-xr-xr-x 2 root root 54320 Jan 21 09:45 mkdir
-r-xr-xr-x 2 root root 175632 Jan 21 09:45 mv
-r-xr-xr-x 2 root root 290128 Jan 21 09:45 pax
-r-xr-xr-x 2 root root 219140 Jan 21 09:45 ps
-r-xr-xr-x 4 root root 61644 Jan 21 09:45 pwd
-r-xr-xr-x 2 root root 522548 Jan 21 09:47 rcp
-r-xr-xr-x 4 root root 61644 Jan 21 09:45 realpath
-r-xr-xr-x 4 root root 144816 Jan 21 09:45 red
-r-xr-xr-x 4 root root 177096 Jan 21 09:45 rm
-r-xr-xr-x 2 root root 58904 Jan 21 09:45 rmail
-r-xr-xr-x 2 root root 50772 Jan 21 09:45 rmdir
-r-xr-xr-x 2 root root 461344 Jan 21 09:45 sh
-r-xr-xr-x 2 root root 48784 Jan 21 09:45 sleep
-r-xr-xr-x 2 root root 74900 Jan 21 09:45 stty
-r-xr-xr-x 2 root root 12540 Jan 21 09:45 sync
-r-xr-xr-x 4 root root 651868 Jan 21 09:45 tcsh
-r-xr-xr-x 4 root root 54640 Jan 21 09:45 test
-r-xr-xr-x 4 root root 177096 Jan 21 09:45 unlink
Thanks for any hints as to why this directory doesn't list if
one is in it but does list if one is either root or doing ls from
outside the bin directory.
Martin McCormick WB5AGZ Stillwater, OK
OSU Information Technology Division Network Operations Group
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