Question

Commands related to inode in Linux

Answer 1

Commands related to inode in Linux

Inode number : Inode number also called index number .An Inode number points to an Inode. An Inode is a data structure that stores the following information about a file :

• Size of file
• Device ID
• User ID of the file
• Group ID of the file
• The file mode information and access privileges for owner, group and others
• File protection flags
• The timestamps for file creation, modification etc
• link counter to determine the number of hard links
• Pointers to the blocks storing file’s contents

Check Inodes on Filesystem

You can find a total number of inodes on disk by using ‘-i‘ option with df command 

Output :  

Find Inode number of File: To check inode number of file use following command. The first field in output is an inode number of the file.

ls -il filename

Output : 

Inode Changes with Copy, Move and Delete :

Copy file: cp allocates a free inode number and placing a new entry in inode table.

Output : 

cp v.txt v_.txt

Move or Rename a file: if destination is same filesystem as the source, Has no impact on inode number, it only changes the time stamps in inode table.

Output : 

mv filename path_where_you_want_to_copy

mv v.txt /home/cloudera 

Delete a file: Deleting a file in Linux decrements the link count and freeing the inode number to be reused. 

Output : 

Commands to access Inode numbers

1) Ls -i Command :the flag -i is used to print the Inode number for each file.

2) Df -i Command: df -i command displays the inode information of the file system.

3) Stat Command:Stat command is used to display file statistics that also displays inode number of a file.

Output : 

ls -i 

df -i

stat a.txt

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