Is there a good way to detect a stale NFS mount

Question

I have a procedure I want to initiate only if several tests complete successfully.

One test I need is that all of my NFS mounts are alive and well.

Can I do better than the brute force approach:

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mount | sed -n "s/^.* on \(.*\) type nfs .*$/\1/p" | 
while read mount_point ; do 
  timeout 10 ls $mount_point >& /dev/null || echo "stale $mount_point" ; 
done

Here timeout is a utility that will run the command in the background, and will kill it after a given time, if no SIGCHLD was caught prior to the time limit, returning success/fail in the obvious way.

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In English: Parse the output of mount, check (bounded by a timeout) every NFS mount point. Optionally (not in the code above) breaking on the first stale mount.

Answer 1

You could write a C program and check for ESTALE.