inodes

inodes is a concept in Linux. Oh wait…no

Fun fact that I learned while experimenting on my macOS - I can see that the term and concept of inodes exists in the context of macOS too

Looks like it’s a “Unix” thing and Linux and Darwin, both are Unix based systems / Unix-like systems

I get to learn more about Unix next, haha. And find out if the term “Unix based systems” even makes sense or if it’s just Unix-like systems and that’s it

inodes are basically the short form for “index nodes”

What are inodes? inodes are basically used to store data about files/directories - basically, metadata about files/directories - like file size, where the file contents are present on the disk and what are the access permissions and so on. Interestingly, it doesn’t have the name of the file/directory in it, and it of course does not have the content of the file/directory. It’s just metadata

Also, searching inodes online on Google also shows that inodes is a term in the context of file systems. I wonder if there are file systems that work across different kernels. Something to checkout

Anyways, it makes sense. inode is in fact a file system level thing. I learned that you set inode limits when creating file systems. So, it’s not exactly a kernel level thing, where it’s about Linux, Darwin etc. inode comes up in Unix-like file systems basically and is a data structure which stores metadata

Fun thing to do - checkout how many inodes you have in one of your file systems

Another fun thing to do - if you have a spare machine, try to exhaust all the inodes without exhausting the disk space. Yes. This is possible! Try and see what happens! You can also create a test file system and do this on the test file system :)

Use AI to help yourself :D I did too :D