Description of problem:

texlive-context has %transfiletriggerin that runs
/usr/bin/mtxrun --generate &> /dev/null || :

The search path that mtxrun uses seems to include ".", and the rpm script is run with '/' as the working directory, causing mtxrun to perform a recursive search starting from the root, and stat()in every file in the tree.

It seems that the recursive search always stops at "/dev/fd/3/" with ENOENT (No such file or directory), so the issue only becomes noticeable if there is a large amount of files before "/dev" - at least in my case the directories are processed alphabetically, so this means directories that sort before "dev" in /.

I happen to have a very large remote file share mounted at /delta that has tens of millions of files.
To make the matter worse, the remote file system has symlink loops and mtxrun has no protection from those, causing the rpm installation process to get stuck for days without completion, continously using CPU and network resources.

I verified the issue on a clean Fedora 33 installation.


Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
20200327-20.fc33

How reproducible:
Always


Steps to Reproduce:
1. Install texlive-context and strace.
2. Run to emulate the transfiletriggerin script:
  sudo sh -c '(cd / && strace -e %file /usr/bin/mtxrun --generate)'

Actual results:
The process stat()s every file from / up to /dev/fd/3/, including recursively processing directories and mount points and file system loops.

Expected results:
The process should not perform searches from file system root.


Additional info: