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Concept
Inode
Summary
The inode (index node) is a data structure in a that describes a object such as a or a directory. Each inode stores the attributes and disk block locations of the object's data. File-system object attributes may include metadata (times of last change, access, modification), as well as owner and data.
A directory is a list of inodes with their assigned names. The list includes an entry for itself, its parent, and each of its children.
There has been uncertainty on the Linux kernel mailing list about the reason for the "i" in "inode". In 2002, the question was brought to Unix pioneer Dennis Ritchie, who replied: In truth, I don't know either. It was just a term that we started to use. "Index" is my best guess, because of the slightly unusual file system structure that stored the access information of files as a flat array on the disk, with all the hierarchical directory information living aside from this. Thus the i-number is an index in this array, the i-node is the selected element of the array. (The "i-" notation was used in the 1st edition manual; its hyphen was gradually dropped.)
A 1978 paper by Ritchie and Ken Thompson bolsters the notion of "index" being the etymological origin of inodes. They wrote: [...] a directory entry contains only a name for the associated file and a pointer to the file itself. This pointer is an integer called the i-number (for index number) of the file. When the file is accessed, its i-number is used as an index into a system table (the i-list) stored in a known part of the device on which the directory resides. The entry found thereby (the file's i-node) contains the description of the file.
Additionally, Maurice J. Bach wrote that the word inode "is a contraction of the term index node and is commonly used in literature on the UNIX system".
A file system relies on data structures about the files, as opposed to the contents of that file. The former are called metadata—data that describes data. Each file is associated with an inode, which is identified by an integer, often referred to as an i-number or inode number.
Official source
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