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Questions tagged [inode]

Data structures used to store metadata for each file on a Unix/Linux filesystem.

inodes (index nodes) are data structures used to store metadata for each file on a Unix/Linux filesystem. inodes typically contain information about the file's permissions and creation, access, and modification times. The number of inodes on a filesystem is set at the time it is created and often cannot be changed; because each file uses at least one inode, the number of inodes available ultimately limits the number of files which may be stored on a filesystem, regardless of their size.

81 questions
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How to get the actual directory size (out of du)?

How do I get the actual directory size, using UNIX/Linux standard tools? Alternative question: How do I get du to show me the actual directory size (not disk usage)? Since people seem to have different definitions of the term "size": My definition…
basic6
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tail -f not tracking file changes

I was recently looking into using tail -f to monitor some text files like so: tail -f /var/sometext. However, when I did some testing, it doesn't seem to work. What I did was I created a new file and ran: tail -f /home/name/text Then, I opened the…
Vince Tar
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7 answers

Remove a file on Linux using the inode number

If you create a file on UNIX/Linux with special characters, such as touch \"la*, you can't remove it with rm "la*. You have to use the inode number (you can if you add the \ before the name, I know, but you'd have to guess as a user that it was used…
KdgDev
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What is the difference between a disk block and a sector?

I know that a sector is the unit in which a track is splitted, but I had this doubt since I was looking for information about the maximum number of pointers that an inode can support. I found that this number depends of the block size. Is this size…
alberto
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Reverse lookup of inode/file from offset in raw device on linux and ext3/4?

In linux, given an offset into a raw disk device, is it possible to map back to an partition + inode? For example, suppose I know that string "xyz" is contained at byte offset 1000000 on /dev/sda: (e.g. xxd -l 100 -s 1000000 /dev/sda shows a dump…
lilinjn
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"Disk quota exceeded" when writing to /tmp, but plenty of space (linux)

i have a VPS. It's managed with the notorious parallels plesk. today i started seeing messages (via wordpress at first, but also from the command line shell), saying: "Disk quota exceeded". user@machine:~$ echo aaa > /tmp/aaa -bash: /tmp/aaa: Disk…
Berry Tsakala
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Go to directory with unknown name

While unpacking a tarball, I encountered a directory which ls reports as "??????????????? ?????". Presumably, the name is not in unicode? Anyway, I can't figure a way to access the folder. I've tried cd $(find -inum inode_number), but that gives…
jackd243
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2 answers

Will long time ext4lazyinit damage the drive? Why initializing inode tables in ext4 (no need any kinda init in NTFS)? etc

I never pay attention on ext4lazyinit before. But today, after I format my 4TB external USB harddrive and the first mount, the led light keeps blinking without any writes and reads. I figured out that is because of ext4lazyinit to initialize inode…
sgon00
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XFS Incorrect statement of "No space left on device"

I have a server setup of an XFS partition on LVM on a Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS. While copying files to the home partition, "No space left on device" is displayed. df -h displays sufficient space: /dev/mapper/prod--vg-home 35G 21G 15G 60% /home I…
Purf
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Linux filesystem with inodes close on the disk

I'd like to make the ls -laR /media/myfs on Linux as fast as possible. I'll have 1 million files on the filesystem, 2TB of total file size, and some directories containing as much as 10000 files. Which filesystem should I use and how should I…
pts
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How to calculate proper amount of inode/block sizes for a linux filesystem

I have an old reiser filesystem which I'm going to convert to Ext3. The problem I have is to determine the proper block- and inode-sizes for this partition. The partition is 44 GB large and has to hold 3,000,000+ files of sizes between 1 kb and…
user36559
4
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2 answers

Is it possible to find all files with a given inode? Efficiently?

It is possible to find all the paths to a file with a given inode, in general, using find's -inum option. But this has awful performance for typical filesystems. What options are there to improve performance? Are there filesystems with special…
Charles Stewart
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Where does the inode number of a file mounted through NFS come from?

I asked a question on codereview to know if I could safely replace the following code: :inode => [stat.ino, stat.dev_major, stat.dev_minor], which threw NotImplementedError because of jruby not retrieving the stat implementation for…
Aldian
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Zero inodes even after formatting hard disk

I have an external 1Tb harddisk which due to some reason was showing following under df -i Filesystem Inodes IUsed IFree IUse% Mounted on /dev/sdb1 0 0 0 - /media/Transcend1T But it has lots of free space…
user13107
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What exactly is an inode as pertaining to filesystems?

As I understand them, apparently an inode basically points to the beginning of a file stored on disk. But it also seems that directories have the same functionality as well (i.e., they store the addresses of other files). I was wondering then, why…
Kaitlyn Mcmordie
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