ll - hangs

[Madhu Sudhan_1]

Hi Guys!
Today Iam stuck with a small problem (May be turning big). I have a directory called ../..../temp in this thereis a 45GB file. When I try to ll on this director it indefinitely hangs. Iam not sure whats going on. Looks like filesystem corruption.

This is a vxfs filesystem.
How do I overcome this problem does fsck fix it ?

Any inputs are appreciated.

Thanks,
Madhu

[Shannon Petry]

ll could be hanging because the file is growing. If something is writing to the file, then ll will hang waiting for the correct info. Since it is always growing, it will never get it, and thus hang.

If you have lsof, I would use it to find out what is writing to the file. else, try ps -ef | grep "FILENAME" to see if you can see what is writing to it. You need to kill that process, or you can not delete it.
You can also try to
>cat /dev/null > FILENAME which may give it a temporary zero bite size. Again though, if you dont know what is writing to it it will grow again, or not let you overwrite it.

Regards,
Shannon

[Frederic Soriano · Accepted solution]

Is it a NFS-mounted directory ? If so, then your NFS server may be stuck or down.

Do you know what process is generating such a big file (eg. fuser -fu /path/to/your/file or lsof) ? This may be the source of your problem.

You can also try to issue a fsck -F vxfs -o full /mountpoint after having unmounted it.

[Dan Hetzel]

Hi Madhu,

you said:
I have a directory called ../..../temp in this thereis a 45GB file

What's the full pathname of your directory?
What about using 'ls' instead of 'll' is it still hanging ?

By the way, is it where you put your tarfile that we were talking about this morning?


Best regards,

Dan

[Madhu Sudhan_1]

Yeah Dan ! It is the same directory where the tar file resides. ls works and ls -l doesn't work. ll doesn't work. Now the problems is worse. Now I can't even say cd temp.

[Patrick Wallek]

Have you done a ps -ef to see if there is anything writing to that file/directory?

Another thing that may be wrong is that you may have a disk going out. I have had this happen to me when I had a power supply on a tray (the old 6000 disk trays) go out and all 5 disks in one tray were down. Although if this is the case, I don't know why ls would work but ll would not.

I would definitely check for any runaway or other processes that might be writing to that file/directory.

[Madhu Sudhan_1]

Hi Patrick !
Iam sure no other process is writing to the file right now. Since it is being a production server, need to wait till some batch process is finished before I could run fsck.

What is the best tool available for full(A-Z) filesystem repair in the world ?

Thanks,
...Madhu

[Patrick Wallek]

I would initially go with fsck. I would do an 'fsck -y -o full /dev/vg##/lvol#'

You may also want to do a 'man fsadm_vxfs' to see what else is available to you. I don't remember if fsadm_vxfs requires the OnlineJFS product or not.