"ls" command stuck trying to list a stale mount point. How do you kill/stop it? When working with remote file systems such as `sshfs` or `smbfs`, it might happen that the file systems become stale due to network problems. To check if the mount is stale or not, I usually use the command `ls` to see if I can list the contents of the remote mounts. When these remote mounts are stale, the `ls` command just waits for a long time until outputting, after some minutes, something along the lines of: ls: cannot access '/mnt/remote': Input/output error Instead of waiting for this error, is there a way to stop the `ls` command from **within the same bash session**? The regular Control+C does not seem to do the job. Closing the bash shell works, but this is undesirable. Any alternatives?

No, since `ls` (or any other file-operating process) is in the process state "uninterruptible sleep", there is nothing that can interrupt it, even `SIGKILL` can't.

Maybe you can lower the timeout values when mounting remote filesystems. `sshfs` has `ServerAliveInterval` and `ServerAliveCountMax`.