Unless you are getting an error message, ls is working but very slowly. You can try looking at just the first ten files like this:
ls -f | head -10
If you're going to need to look at the file details for a while, you can put them in a file first. You probably want to send the output to a different directory than the one you are listing at the moment!
ls > ~/lots-of-files.txt
If you want to do something to the files, you can use xargs. If you decide to write a script of some kind to do the work, make sure that your script will process the list of files as a stream rather than all at once. Here's an example of moving all the files.
ls | xargs -I thefilename mv thefilename ~/some/other/directory
You could combine that with head to move a smaller number of the files.
ls | head -10000 | xargs -I x mv x /first/ten/thousand/files/go/here
You can probably combine ls | head into a shell script to that will split up the files into a bunch of directories with a manageable number of files in each.
