Some times you may come across below error.

touch: cannot touch `abc.txt’: No space left on device // using touch.

This will be bit annoying when you come to know there is a space left in your desk. The culprit in this case is total number of used inodes. If all your inodes are used away you can not create a file/folder though you have plenty of free space left in your machine. Ok, how can I conform how many inodes I used in my machine? We can use df command to get those details.

df -i

Output:

root@linuxnix:/home# df -i
 Filesystem Inodes IUsed IFree IUse% Mounted on
 udev 990478 556 989922 1% /dev
 tmpfs 993174 622 992552 1% /run
 /dev/sdb1 1466368 698247 768121 48% /
 none 993174 11 993163 1% /sys/fs/cgroup
 none 993174 3 993171 1% /run/lock
 none 993174 272 992902 1% /run/shm
 none 993174 32 993142 1% /run/user
 /dev/sda1 0 0 0 - /boot/efi
 /dev/sda4 53968896 11752 53957144 1% /opt
 /dev/sda2 6111232 46648 6064584 1% /home
 /dev/mmcblk0p1 0 0 0 - /media/surendra/9016-4EF8

From the above output Second column represents total number of available inodes and third column shows how many inodes you used.

To get total inodes in your machine use below command.

root@linuxnix:/home# df -i --total
 Filesystem Inodes IUsed IFree IUse% Mounted on
 udev 990478 556 989922 1% /dev
 tmpfs 993174 622 992552 1% /run
 /dev/sdb1 1466368 698248 768120 48% /
 none 993174 11 993163 1% /sys/fs/cgroup
 none 993174 3 993171 1% /run/lock
 none 993174 272 992902 1% /run/shm
 none 993174 32 993142 1% /run/user
 /dev/sda1 0 0 0 - /boot/efi
 /dev/sda4 53968896 11752 53957144 1% /opt
 /dev/sda2 6111232 46648 6064584 1% /home
 /dev/mmcblk0p1 0 0 0 - /media/surendra/9016-4EF8
 root@192.34.60.236:/root 1310720 124303 1186417 10% /mnt
 total 68813564 882447 67931117 2% -

If you see any thing like 100% inodes used in df -i output, then it’s time to dig more to see where are my maximum number of inodes located. In Linux/Unix we don’t have a direct command to check which folder have maximum number of inodes available. We have to use our scripting knowledge to get those details. By this time you should know each file(any file like regular file, directory, socket etc) will corresponds to one inode. This is the clue to find out where maximum files/inodes are located.  Use below one liner script to check which folder under / have maximum number of inodes.

root@linuxnix:/home# for i in /*;do echo "Number of inodes in $i is $(find $i | wc -l)";done
 Number of inodes in /bin is 162
 Number of inodes in /boot is 645
 Number of inodes in cdrom is 1
 Number of inodes in /dev is 580
 Number of inodes in /etc is 3148
 Number of inodes in /home is 46619
 Number of inodes in /initrd.img is 1
 Number of inodes in /initrd.img.old is 1
 Number of inodes in /lib is 74086
 Number of inodes in /lib32 is 44
 Number of inodes in /lib64 is 4
 Number of inodes in /lost+found is 1
 Number of inodes in /media is 152
 Number of inodes in /mnt is 1333
 Number of inodes in /opt is 11743
 Number of inodes in /proc is 312948
 Number of inodes in /root is 997
 Number of inodes in /run is 653
 Number of inodes in /sbin is 192
 Number of inodes in /srv is 1
 Number of inodes in /sys is 36835
 Number of inodes in /tmp is 32
 Number of inodes in /usr is 573832
 Number of inodes in /var is 45105
 Number of inodes in /vmlinuz is 1
 Number of inodes in /vmlinuz.old is 1

From the above list we can concentrate on /usr folder to dig more and check which folder with in /usr have maximum number of inodes.

root@linuxnix:/home# for i in /usr/*;do echo "Number of inodes in $i is $(find $i | wc -l)";done
 Number of inodes in /usr/bin is 2843
 Number of inodes in /usr/games is 6
 Number of inodes in /usr/include is 2907
 Number of inodes in /usr/lib is 39360
 Number of inodes in /usr/lib32 is 258
 Number of inodes in /usr/local is 1550
 Number of inodes in /usr/sbin is 240
 Number of inodes in /usr/share is 154729
 Number of inodes in /usr/src is 371938

In this way, you can go as deep as possible and try to remove unwanted files to free up some inodes. Keep visiting www.linuxnix.com for more Linux/Unix tips.

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Surendra Anne

Mr Surendra Anne is from Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh, India. He is a Linux/Open source supporter who believes in Hard work, A down to earth person, Likes to share knowledge with others, Loves dogs, Likes photography. He works as Devops Engineer with Taggle systems, an IOT automatic water metering company, Sydney . You can contact him at surendra (@) linuxnix dot com.