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I was messing about with different wildcards and ran the following command:

ls testdir/!(*/)

after which I was completely unable to get back to the bash prompt. None of ^C, ^D, or even ^Z worked: they just printed those literal characters.

Update: I discovered that simply typing:

ls !()

had the same effect. Removing my .bash_history did not help.

So, two questions:

  1. Is it possible to recover from that command?

  2. What exactly did I tell bash to do and what's it waiting for?

Notes:

If I just run !(*/) it just says "event not found"

If I run ls !(*/) or echo !(*/) then it does the same as above

The bash processes are in the list at 100% CPU, but not ls

Running the same command on an lxc container just gives "event not found" My bash options are pretty much stock Ubuntu 14.04. Nothing weird.

Using set -x before the ls command doesn't echo anything.

Notes2: Output from shopt

 autocd off cdable_vars off cdspell off checkhash off checkjobs off checkwinsize on cmdhist on compat31 off compat32 off compat40 off compat41 off compat42 off complete_fullquote on direxpand off dirspell off dotglob off execfail off expand_aliases on extdebug off extglob on extquote on failglob off force_fignore on globstar off globasciiranges off gnu_errfmt off histappend on histreedit off histverify off hostcomplete off huponexit off interactive_comments on lastpipe off lithist off login_shell off mailwarn off no_empty_cmd_completion off nocaseglob off nocasematch off nullglob off progcomp on promptvars on restricted_shell off shift_verbose off sourcepath on xpg_echo off

Output from set +o

 set +o allexport set -o braceexpand set -o emacs set +o errexit set +o errtrace set +o functrace set -o hashall set -o histexpand set -o history set +o ignoreeof set -o interactive-comments set +o keyword set -o monitor set +o noclobber set +o noexec set +o noglob set +o nolog set +o notify set +o nounset set +o onecmd set +o physical set +o pipefail set +o posix set +o privileged set +o verbose set +o vi set +o xtrace
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  • Is it possible for you to kill ls command from other terminal ? Commented Jul 17, 2015 at 7:22
  • The ls command does not appear in the process list. I guess it's not got started yet. Commented Jul 17, 2015 at 7:32
  • You have to kill your bash instance, and closing the terminal will not do that. The bash instance will be running at 100%, use top to look it up. Commented Jul 17, 2015 at 8:00
  • For someone to tell (or guess well) what happened, they'd need to know what options were set in your shell and what that * expanded to. It looks like ordinary history expansion, but I can't really see how that could hang bash. Commented Jul 17, 2015 at 8:09
  • Ah, yes, just tried the same command on a container, and it just gives "event not found" so clearly the first thing is it's pulling something from my history. I'll see if I can figure out what. Commented Jul 17, 2015 at 8:18

1 Answer 1

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shw@shw:/tmp $ ls testdir/!(*/) & pidls=$! [1] 18453 shw@shw:/tmp $ shw@shw:/tmp $ cat /proc/18453/cmdline bashshw@shw:/tmp $ shw@shw:/tmp $ shw@shw:/tmp $ kill -9 18453 shw@shw:/tmp $ [1]+ Killed ls --color=auto testdir/!(*/) shw@shw:/tmp $
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