Thread: file files by inode number

Every file has an unique inode number, using that we can identify that file. Create two files with similar name. i.e one file with a space at the end.

# touch "test-file-name"

# touch "test-file-name "
[Note: There is a space at the end]

# ls -1 test*
test-file-name
test-file-name


From the ls output, you cannot identify which file has the space at the end. Using option -i, you can view the inode number of the file, which will be different for these two files.

# ls -i1 test*
16187429 test-file-name
16187430 test-file-name


You can specify inode number on a find command as shown below. In this example, find command renames a file using the inode number.

# find -inum 16187430 -exec mv {} new-test-file-name \;

# ls -i1 *test*
16187430 new-test-file-name
16187429 test-file-name


You can use this technique when you want to do some operation with the files which are named poorly as shown in the example below. For example, the file with name — file?.txt has a special character in it. If you try to execute “rm file?.txt”, all the following three files will get removed. So, follow the steps below to delete only the “file?.txt” file.

# ls
file1.txt file2.txt file?.txt


Find the inode numbers of each file.

# ls -i1
804178 file1.txt
804179 file2.txt
804180 file?.txt


Use the inode number to remove the file that had special character in it as shown below.

# find -inum 804180 -exec rm {} \;

# ls
file1.txt file2.txt
[Note: The file with name "file?.txt" is now removed]

you can also try using escape char for deleting it !

rm file\?

above two works well, hope this helps !

Thanks !
Siva