Jamie O'Shaughnessy [ Tue, 16 Jul 2002 20:06:06 +0000 (GMT)]:
Can anyone point me to somewhere to find out more information about inodes and how they relate to the contents of a partition.
Inodes are the basic building blocks of the classic unix filesystem. These hold pointers to the sectors that contain the data.
I specifically want to know what happens when you reach the limit (if there is one) for the inodes on a disk/partition?
If you run out of inodes nothing can be stored anymore so effectively your disk/partition is full.
Is there a way to increase the inodes available for instance?
Not at runtime. Inode density may only be choosen when creating a file system.
I've got a big disk (80Gb) with lots of data files on and it's soon going to be full. I'm interested to find out if I'll hit an inode limit before the actual disk space limit.
'df -i' shows you the free inodes, see 'man df' for further information. Mind you, not all file systems do actually use inodes but rather fake them. AFAIR reiserfs is one of those, so it would depend on the type of the filesystem whether inode density could be a problem for you or not. Philipp -- Philipp Thomas work: pthomas@suse.de Development SuSE Linux AG private: philippt@t-online.de -- Philipp Thomas work: pthomas@suse.de Development SuSE Linux AG private: philippt@t-online.de