Which command will display the inode number of the files in the temp directory?
Last updated on: 2021-03-19 Show
Authored by: Miguel Salgado This article provides an overview of the concept of inode and some helpful commands. What is an inode?Linux® must allocate an index node (inode) for every file and directory in the filesystem. Inodes do not store actual data. Instead, they store the metadata where you can find the storage blocks of each file’s data. Metadata in an inodeThe following metadata exists in an inode:
Check the inode number in a specific fileThere are different ways to check the inode number. The following example shows the creation of a file named
mytestfile. The command
You can also check the inode number of mytestfile by listing the contents of the directory. You can run a combination of commands in the directory by using
Check the inode usage on filesystemsThe following example checks the inodes on all the mounted filesystems, focusing on /dev/xvda1, which has a maximum inode allocation of 1,310,720:
Adding the flag
Count inodes under a certain directoryTo check the number of inodes in a specific directory, run the following command:
The following example checks the file count in the /root directory.
In this case, it shows 11 files created under /root. What happens to the inode assigned when moving or copying a file?When you copy a file, Linux assigns a different inode to the new file, as shown in the following example:
Things are different when moving a file. As long as the file does not change filesystems, the inode remains the same:
The following example moves file1 from /dev/xvda1 to the /dev/xvdb1 filesystem:
When the system moved the file to another filesystem, it assigned a different inode. Best practices to keep the inode usage lowYou should check your inode usage because excessive usage can lead to issues when creating newer files. Perform the following steps to keep your usage low:
What could happen if you never attend to inodes?Even though the server has free disk space, the server can run out of inodes, which can result in the following consequences when the server does not have enough inodes when creating more files:
Which of these command will show the files inode number?Each Inode has a unique number and Inode number can be seen with the help of ls -li command.
What is the inode number of the home directory?The filesystem root directory is inode 2. The meaning of particular inode numbers differs by filesystem.
What is the inode number in Linux?The inode number refers to the physical file, the data stored in a particular location. A file also has a device number, and the combination of its inode number and device number is unique throughout all the file systems in the hierarchical file system.
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