What could possibly cause a Linux “ls” command to return a seg fault?

Question

I am installing some new software. It contains several libraries in a "Lib" directory. If I ls Lib from another directory, I get the usual list of files. I can issue dir and file commands and get reasonable results too. I can even copy files out of this directory to other directories. But if I cd to "Lib", it appears that any linux command I give returns a seg fault. I can't run ls , file , or dir in that directory. I can't even run date there without a seg fault. Much obliged if anyone can help me clear up this mystery.

Answer 1

Probably your LD_LIBRARY_PATH includes a dot / . and that Lib directory contains standard libraries like libc, so what ever command you issue, system picks a library from that path and something goes wrong.

Answer 2

On my rpi I observed today the same issue:

$ ls
Segmentation fault

What it solved for me was:

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade