Shell – Portable Way to Find Inode Number

inodeshell

At first I used stat -c %i file (to help detect the presence of a jail), which seemed to work on any Linux distribution under the sun. On OS X' I had to use ls -i file | cut -d ' ' -f 1.

Is there some way to find the inode number of a file in a shell script which is portable across *nix platforms and does not depend on the notoriously capricious ls?

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Possible solution: The POSIX spec for ls specifies -i, so maybe it's portable. Does anyone know of a popular implementation of ls which does not support this, or prints it in a different way from the following example:

$ ls -di /
2 /

Related Solutions

Quickly find which file(s) belongs to a specific inode number

For an ext4 filesystem, you can use debugfs as in the following example:

$ sudo debugfs -R 'ncheck 393094' /dev/sda2 2>/dev/null
Inode   Pathname
393094  /home/enzotib/examples.desktop

The answer is not immediate, but seems to be faster than find.

The output of debugfs can be easily parsed to obtain the file names:

$ sudo debugfs -R 'ncheck 393094' /dev/sda2 | cut -f2 | tail -n2 > filenames

How to find inode number using “find” command

Try doing this (requires cygwin or such):

find . -type f -name 'test*' -printf '%p %i\n'

See

man find | less +/'-printf format'

Notes :

%p stands for file path
%i stands for inode number

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Related Solutions

Quickly find which file(s) belongs to a specific inode number

How to find inode number using “find” command

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