Where are all my inodes being used?

Joel_31092 0
Viewed 88578

How do I find out which directories are responsible for chewing up all my inodes?

Ultimately the root directory will be responsible for the largest number of inodes, so I'm not sure exactly what sort of answer I want..

Basically, I'm running out of available inodes and need to find a unneeded directory to cull.

Thanks, and sorry for the vague question.

inode posix unix linux
16 Answers

So basically you're looking for which directories have a lot of files? Here's a first stab at it:

find . -type d -print0 | xargs -0 -n1 count_files | sort -n

where "count_files" is a shell script that does (thanks Jonathan)

echo $(ls -a "$1" | wc -l) $1
Paul_Tomblin_33330

Here's a simple Perl script that'll do it:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

sub count_inodes($);
sub count_inodes($)
{
  my $dir = shift;
  if (opendir(my $dh, $dir)) {
    my $count = 0;
    while (defined(my $file = readdir($dh))) {
      next if ($file eq '.' || $file eq '..');
      $count++;
      my $path = $dir . '/' . $file;
      count_inodes($path) if (-d $path);
    }
    closedir($dh);
    printf "%7d\t%s\n", $count, $dir;
  } else {
    warn "couldn't open $dir - $!\n";
  }
}

push(@ARGV, '.') unless (@ARGV);
while (@ARGV) {
  count_inodes(shift);
}

If you want it to work like du (where each directory count also includes the recursive count of the subdirectory) then change the recursive function to return $count and then at the recursion point say:

$count += count_inodes($path) if (-d $path);
Alnitak_67820

There's no need for complex for/ls constructions. You can get 10 fattest (in terms of inode usage) directories with:

du --inodes --separate-dirs --one-file-system | sort -rh | head

which equals to:

du --inodes -Sx | sort -rh | head

--one-file-system parameter is optional.

user_59920360

use 

ncdu -x <path>

then press Shitf+c to sort by items count where the item is file

user_27255630

When searching for folder consuming most disk space, I used to work with du top to bottom like this:

du -hs /*

This is listing file consumption per top-level folder. Afterwards, you can descend into either folder by extending given pattern:

du -hs /var/*

and so on ...

Now, when it comes to inodes, the same tool can be used with slightly different arguments:

du -s --inodes /*

There is a caching improving follow-up invocations of this tool in same folder which is beneficial under normal circumstances. However, when you've run out of inodes I assume this will turn into the opposite.

user_31828190
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