File Systems: Difference between revisions

Inodes (information nodes) are a crucial design element in most Unix filesystemsfile systems: Each file is made of data blocks (the sectors that contains your raw data bits), index blocks (containing pointers to data blocks so that you know which sector is the nth in the sequence), and one inode block.

The inode is the root of the index blocks, and can also be the sole index block if the file is small enough. Moreover, as unixUnix filesystemsfile systems support hard links (the same file may appear several times in the directory tree), inodes are a natural place to store metadataMetadata such as file size, owner, creation/access/modification times, locks, etc.