I use “ls” to transverse on my Solaris 8 file system structure. If I “ls /opt” or “ls /export”, the shell command hanging there forever and I have to use Ctrl-C to get out it.
But I have no problem to list directory beneath it such as “ls /opt/Ccase” or “ls /export/home20”. Please advice what is this problem?

Are you using any kind of NFS mounted filesystems under those 2 directories?
Try the mount command with no options to see what is mounted.

Do you have an abundance of files or sub-directories in those directories?

Try an "echo *" instead of ls. Check for strange names of files or directories in the output. Strange names might be something like "C:\<Directory>" (Yes I've seen it) or "?Directory" or simply one character jobs like "*", "?", etc...

Hi jdc2048,

Yes, I am using NFS mounted filesystems and I have an abundance of files and sub-directories in those directories.

I try an "echo *" instead of ls. But it still hangs forever and I have Ctrl-C to get out it (the same as using "ls"). Please advice what I can do?

Best regards,
ww7258

Are the NFS directly mounted on either of these partitions? And if so, is the remote fileserver up and serving? (showmount -a <server>)

By abundance, how many are we talking? <500, 500-1000, 1000-5000, >5000? Are they in a single directory or are they distributed into many sub-directories? Too many files in a single directory will cause many headaches. You need to break them up into sub-directories.

Also what are the chances that you created a self-referencing soft-link. see example below

A self referencing link like this will cause a recursive problem with the find command, but I don't know if it will cause problems with ls or "echo *".

One thing that never hurts is to run an "fsck" to check the filesystem. You will need to boot to single user, or unmount the FS if possible.