Jonathan Love

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Inodes

https://www.howtogeek.com/465350/everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-inodes-on-linux/ https://metebalci.com/blog/a-minimum-complete-tutorial-of-linux-ext4-file-system/

inodes are a data structure of POSIX

File Systems

File System

https://tldp.org/LDP/sag/html/filesystems.html The methods and datastructures that allow for organising and accessing data on disk. Filesystem-like structures exist...

(notably the ext family, e.g. ext4

ext4

https://ext4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Ext4DiskLayout Journaling File System developed for Linux Replaces ext3 Ext systems (like ext4) have a superblock data structure...

) that describe a File

Files

Represents one or more blocks of data that make up a file. The disk Blocks that...

or Directory

Directory

Represents a structure containing zero or more Files and other directories In a tree-like File System...

on disk

The inode stores metadata such as access permissions and modified/created dates, allocated disk blocks

inodes are stored in an inode table, which are referenced from the Block Group Descriptor Table

An inode with no Hard Links

is considered an orphan

File Areas

Files

may be split over different physical blocks on disk. In older filesystems (e.g. ext3

ext3

Journaling File System for Linux Replaced by ext4...

), inodes would contain a reference to one more more blocks for each block in a file; for very large or fragmented files, those blocks would contain further pointers to other blocks

In later systems (e.g. ext4

), this system has changed to use Extents

Extents

A contiguous area of storage, reserved for a File, recorded against an inode using the...

, which are capable of recording just the start and end blocks for each contiguous area containing the file


Interactive Graph

InodesPOSIX StandardFile Systemext4FilesDirectoryHard Linksext3ExtentsSymlinksBSDLinuxWindowsProcessesIPCSignalsC Standard LibrarySocketsGCCmacOSSystem CallThreadingPseudo File SystemVFSntfsapfsbtrfsexfatfatfat32hfs+zfsBlocksCopy On Write (COW)GUID Partition Table (GPT)Master Boot Record (MBR)Master File Table (MFT)PartitionsUEFIFile System JournalUser SpaceprocfssysfsJonathan Love