grep -R hangs when issued upon certain directory

[Elmar Stellnberger]

  I am not sure what grep does not like about my home directory, but as
soon as I issue a "grep -R Testtext *" in my home dir grep will start to
hang not triggering any further disk access after a short while.
Tried to get a backtrace by installing coreutils-debuginfo and
coreutils-debugsource but gdb does not find any symbols:

> rpm -ql coreutils-debugsource coreutils-debuginfo|grep grep
> (nothing found)
 i.e.
> gdb
> attach pid
> bt
... does not provide any useful output
#0  0x00007fe8fc790af0 in open64 () from /lib64/libc.so.6
#1  0x000000000040386c in ?? ()
#2  0x0000000000404310 in ?? ()
#3  0x0000000000403d20 in ?? ()
#4  0x0000000000405558 in ?? ()
#5  0x00007fe8fc6e9586 in __libc_start_main () from /lib64/libc.so.6
#6  0x00000000004021c9 in ?? ()

> grep --version
GNU grep 2.5.2
...

> ls -l /proc/14624/cwd
lrwxrwxrwx 1 elm users 0  9. Mai 12:24 /proc/14624/cwd -> /home/elm

i.e. it does not seem to descend to subdirs)