Freezing when find-file in a directory containing a bad mountpoint

[jackkamm]

Today, on the HPC cluster I work on, I noticed that Emacs would freeze up when using find-file with icomplete-mode and completion-style orderless. The issue seems to be due to a bad mountpoint in the directory I called find-file with.

Here's the scenario. My home directory has a symlink ~/bad-mountpoint -> /path/to/bad-mountpoint, where /path/to/bad-mountpoint is some sort of network share. Today, something went wrong with that mountpoint, so that when I call ls /path/to/bad-mountpoint in the shell, the command hangs until I interrupt it Control+C.

Now, in Emacs, when I do C-x C-f in my home directory, Emacs freezes and I'm unable to recover. However, when I switch completion-styles back to the default value (without orderless), then Emacs works fine again.

If I remove the bad symlink in my home directory, then using the orderless completion style works again.

I was wondering if you had insight into what might cause this, or whether there's anything that can be done to make orderless more robust to this situation.

Sorry if this is somewhat vague. As I mentioned above, this is on an HPC cluster, where I don't have any admin powers, and I don't know all the details of how the sysadmins have set up mount points and network shares. So it's a little tricky to troubleshoot this.