How to: Get the Inode utilization data of a filesystem using df command
When we talk about a file in ex2/3/4 filesystems, it consists of two kinds of information - filename and inode. The latter is a special data structure to store information about the file - file type, size, ownership, access information(read,write,execute bits), location of the file content etc. Such type of information is also known as metadata.
An important thing to note is that inode doesn’t contain the content/data of a file. It only points to the location. Another interesting thing about them is that, they are not created on the fly. A fixed number of inodes is already made whenever a new file system is created. This number denotes the maximum number of files that can be supported by the filesystem, not the size/amount of data.
We can find the total number of inodes for a filesytem, both consumed and free ones using the df command.
This command is used to provide information regarding filesystem utilization. Using its “-i” argument, we can view all the information related to inodes.
[shredder12]$ df -i
/dev/sda2 917504 353597 563907 39% /
none 212507 833 211674 1% /dev
none 216609 32 216577 1% /dev/shm
none 216609 88 216521 1% /var/run
none 216609 4 216605 1% /var/lock
/dev/sda5 6291456 102799 6188657 2% /home
As you can see 39% of Inodes are used up in the "/" partition. This is because there are a lot of small files e.g - /usr/share/doc contains tons of files. If you notice, this is not the case with the /home directory. It actually consumes 9 times more space than the "/" partition but utilizes only 1/16th as compare to it.
[shredder12]$ df -h
/dev/sda2 14G 8.7G 4.5G 67% /
none 1.3G 276K 1.3G 1% /dev
none 1.3G 8.2M 1.3G 1% /dev/shm
none 1.3G 296K 1.3G 1% /var/run
none 1.3G 0 1.3G 0% /var/lock
/dev/sda5 95G 79G 12G 88% /home
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