🎁 New User? Get 20% off your first purchase with code NEWUSER20 Register Now →
Menu

Categories

Linux Advanced

What is Inode?

A data structure in Unix filesystems that stores metadata about a file, excluding its name and data.

An inode contains information about a file including its size, ownership, permissions, timestamps, and pointers to the data blocks. Each file has a unique inode number within its filesystem.

The inode does not store the filename — that mapping is maintained in directory entries. This is why hard links work: multiple directory entries can point to the same inode.

Related Terms

Journald
The systemd journal daemon that collects and stores log data from services, the kernel, and boot messages in a structured binary format.
Firewalld
A dynamic firewall management tool for Linux that provides a D-Bus interface for managing firewall rules with zones.
Dmesg
A command that displays kernel ring buffer messages, useful for diagnosing hardware and driver issues.
Disk Quota
A system for limiting the amount of disk space or number of files that individual users or groups can consume on a filesystem.
ACL (Access Control List)
An extension to standard Linux file permissions that allows setting fine-grained access rights for specific users and groups beyond owner/group/other.
LVM (Logical Volume Manager)
A storage management framework that provides flexible disk management through abstract layers of physical and logical volumes.
 View All Linux Terms →