On Wed 11 Aug 1999, Mike Sienicki wrote:
> If you "newfs -i 16384 /dev/rsd2a" does that mean that you can store up to
> 16,384  files and/or directories on the device when it's used as a block
> device? I understand that inode is a number that points to an information
> block in the inode table that gives info about a particular file. So I am
> assuming that you don't need to specify any inodes if your going to dump a
> file structure to a raw disk device for backup purposes. Am I right in
> stating this?

No, it means that newfs will reserve an inode for each 16KB of space on the
filesystem. An inode is a data-structure that contains info about the
whereabouts of the file data in the filesystem. It also contains the
protection info, timestamps ed. Each inode has a (filesystem-wide) unique
number to identify it. When the file is not on a (ufs or ffs) filesystem, but
on a tape, the inode is useless. Inodes belong to a filesystem implementation.
The msdos filesystem has no inodes.
Some of the include-files in the '/usr/include/ufs/' hierarchy describe
the ufs/ffs filesystem implementation and have comments that might be worth
reading. I don't know about a book on the subject.

Leo.