What is inodes?

[senthil_kumar_1]

Hi All,

I have some doubts about inodes.

1)What is the purpose of inodes?

2)What is difference between inodes and metadata?

3)How inodes are created and how many inodes are created for a file system?

4)What will happen if all inodes of a file system being used?

5)How to increase the inodes?

Thanks a lot in advance...

[Dennis Handly]

>1)What is the purpose of inodes?

To point to the files or the name of the symlinks.  Or if multiple extents, to each one.

>2)What is difference between inodes and metadata?

It seems like almost the same thing?

>3)How inodes are created and how many inodes are created for a file system?

What type of filesystem?  For HFS it is fixed.  For VXFS, by default it can increase.

>4)What will happen if all inodes of a file system being used?

For HFS, you can't create new files.  You can tar off lots of small files and just keep the tar file.

>5)How to increase the inodes?

For HFS, you must recreate the filesystem.  For VXFS, it will make more automatically.

[basant]

An inode identifies the file and its attributes such as file size, owner, and so on. A unique inode number within the file system identifies each inode. But, why to delete file by an inode number? Sure, you can use rm command to delete file. Sometime accidentally you creates filename with control characters or characters which are unable to be input on a keyboard or special character such as ?, * ^ etc. Removing such special character filenames can be problem. Use following method to delete a file with strange characters in its name

First find out file inode number with any one of the following command:

stat {file-name}

OR

ls -il {file-name}

Remove file by an inode number, but first find out the file inode number:
$ ls -il

781956 drwx------  3 viv viv 4096 2006-01-27 15:05 gconfd-viv
781964 drwx------  2 viv viv 4096 2006-01-27 15:05 keyring-pKracm

Find and remove file using find command, type the command as follows:
$ find . -inum 781956 -exec rm -i {} \;

Metadata (metacontent) is defined as data providing information about one or more aspects of the data, such as:

• Means of creation of the data
• Purpose of the data
• Time and date of creation
• Creator or author of data
• Placement on a computer network where the data was created
• Standards used
• The basic information of a piece of music